Eureka!

Eureka! was an exciting 1984 computer game for the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum computers, developed by Ian Livingstone (famous for the Warlock of Fire top Mountain series of roll playing books) and published by Domark in 1984.

Eureka! is a text adventure set in European history. It consists of five parts, each of which has to be loaded and played separately. The first four parts can be played in any order, but the fifth part can only be played after all the other parts have been completed. The Domark also promised a huge amount of money £25000 to be exact, to the first person to crack the code. As you can imagine me and my dad were at it day and night without sleep for the first 2 weeks before we started realising how mums reality started setting in: its true we were never going to crack it, we didn’t even know who Julius Ceasar was! The first player to solve the entire game before December 31, 1985 was Matthew Woodley, a teenager from the UK (not me or my dad).

The Game was a simple text based adventure with limited graphics.The five sections of the game were Prehistoric Europe, Ancient Rome, Arthurian Britain, Wartime Germany and finally Modern Caribbean

Prehistoric Europe: Set in a valley somewhere in the Jurassic period. You have to escape from the valley and avoid hungry dinosaurs.
Ancient Rome: Set in ancient Rome somewhere around the first or second century B.C. You have to escape from slavery and win a horse race at the Circus Maximus.
Arthurian Britain: Set in medieval Britain during King Arthur’s time. You have to foil the evil Mordred’s plans.
Wartime Germany: Set in Germany during World War II. You have to escape a prisoner of war camp back to your own country.
Modern Caribbean: Set in the Caribbean in the 1980s. You finally confront your nemesis in his island-based stronghold and have to stop him from conquering the world.
At the start of Modern Caribbean, the game asks questions from each of the first four parts. You have to answer every question correctly to start the fifth part of the game.

The game had an arcade style part like pac man at the beginning of each section and then in the main adventure had time limits in rooms where quick decisions had to be made. If you didn’t find food early on the person you played would loose health points and eventually die when down to zero points. Eureka! was all atmosphere and game play but rubbish on graphics.