Mountain Valley Software — Australian made text adventure 1981–1987 — tribute site
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Castle of Mydor box artwork

Castle of Mydor

Commodore 64CassetteDisk

An evil wizard has cast a spell over the land of Mydor and stolen away the sacred Crown, symbol of the Kingdom's power. You must find the wizard's cave hidden deep beneath the dungeons, defeat the wizard and return the Crown to the throne room. But beware — many dangers lie in store inside the Castle of Mydor.

Transcribed from the cassette inlay.

1983 · Copyright 1983 on the disk loading screen; advertised October 1984

Play it

The disk image is under “From the archive” below. It runs in VICE, which is free for Windows, macOS and Linux, or on a THEC64. Two-word commands: HELP, GET KNIFE, GO NORTH, GET HELMET. The hint sheet below has the solutions.

How it plays

Commands the manual gives as examples: HELP, GET KNIFE, GO NORTH, GET HELMET.

Screens

In game
In game
In game (2)
In game (2)
Loading screen — cassette
Loading screen — cassette
Loading screen — disk
Loading screen — disk

Design notebook

From Brian Betts’s working notes, scanned flat. Open a page to read it full size.

Notebook page headed The Enchanted Castle: location grid, abbreviation key in pencil and blue pen, item list and verb list
Headed “The Enchanted Castle”, which seems to be what Castle of Mydor was called while Betts was writing it. The bridge with its troll over a chasm, the armoury, the throne room and the elves’ cave on this grid are all in the released game. Around the grid are the abbreviation key in pencil and blue pen, a list of items (crown, helmet, amulet, troll club, pistol, magic wand), the verb list ticked off word by word, and four of the game’s messages written as string variables, among them Y$ = “I can’t do that… yet”.

Earlier cover

A second, unbordered cover design for this title, and most likely the packaging it had before October 1984. That autumn Mountain Valley told dealers it had “completely redesigned and upgraded” its cover artwork, and the list of titles it sent out with the October offer shows every game in the bordered design at the top of this page. Only titles already in the range have a design like this one: the two released with the redesign, Himalayan Odyssey and The Volcano of Raka-Tua, do not. The letters are in the archive.

Castle of Mydor — earlier, unbordered cover artwork
Open the image to see it full size.

Reviewed

  • 80% — Commodore Magazine, vol. 5 no. 6, c. 1985 Read it

From the archive