Despite the fact that both “The Lords of Midnight” and “Doomdark’s Revenge” were written by Mike Singleton over 35 years ago, an eternity in computer and video game history, the odd surprise can still be thrown up and a little more of the history around the games revealed.

You’ll be aware of the genesis of my Lords of Midnight novelisation (if not read here) and how a novel was originally promised to the first person to win the game and provide evidence of so doing – by printing out their adventure on paper and sending it in by post… there was no internet in those days. That story is a bit of a legend in its own right. However, in the last few weeks, I’ve been privileged enough to get in contact with some of the individuals who were involved at the time, allowing me to shed a little more light onto this ancient history of times long past… or 1984 as we like to call it!

The first ancient artefact unearthed was a letter from the “Beyond Robot” (Beyond Software – the original publisher of the games) to a competition entrant, thanking them for their entry, but informing them that they had sadly not been the first to submit a winning entry…

Following on shortly after this was an example of one of those entry competitions… a record of the game printed out on thermal paper. The ZX Printer of the time (and many of its rivals) didn’t use the common 9 pin or 24 pin dot-matrix affair, hammering against a coated ribbon to create text on ordinary paper, but rather used heat transfer onto a special roll of thermal paper to produce the text and images. The ZX Printer was affectionate known as the “Bog Roll Printer” for reasons which are fairly obvious.