The Lost Planet

Gosub 5000 Productions (1990/2019)
 

Written by Gareth Pitchford

"On a search for the legendary Planet of Origin, the crew of the SS HERALD receive a mysterious message emanating from a promising-looking planetary candidate.

As they prepare to teleport down to the surface to investigate, the signal appears to cause a malfunction in one of their robots, the hybrid android R0A5, who attempts to scramble the teleporter beam and kill the survey team.

Scattered across the planet, the trio's only hope of survival seemingly lies in the ancient, abandoned temple structures. Perhaps they will provide a way of accessing the hidden underground city?"

The Lost Planet is the first instalment of a three-part text adventure called Destination: Planet of Origin, which was one of the first games I designed, way back in 1989/1990, but it was never programmed. Just for my own amusement, or rather as a favour for my sixteen-year-old self, I've finally taken part one's design off the page and turned it into a playable game.

When programming this 2019 version, I tried to follow the game design as accurately as I could; replicating all the original puzzles and text with as few changes as possible. Some slight alterations have been made to make the finished product a little more palatable to a modern audience. The original design featured several points of no return, for all three characters. At the time the game was designed, it was not unusual for games to put players in unwinnable positions and require them to learn from their mistakes or restart to see if they'd missed something earlier on. The original game design also featured quite a few instances of sudden death. Although these have been retained, I hope I've come up with a way of making them less annoying.

The Lost Planet (2019) - ZX Spectrum 48K:

 

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