It’s a little-known fact but the sight of a wobbling aspidistra plant can bring on quite powerful flashbacks for anyone who grew up in the first flushes of the early 80s home computer era, and it’s all thanks to a kids TV show called The Adventure Game. A selection of episodes of this almost-forgotten oddity were recently added to the Britbox streaming service, while there’s also a DVD boxset containing all the surviving episodes. If you have any interest in how gaming evolved it’s a fascinating case study.
The Adventure Game was created in 1979 by veteran BBC children’s producer Patrick Dowling, who had previously delivered such era-defining shows as the summer holiday staple Why Don’t You…? and brought genteel artist Tony Hart to our screens in Vision On and later Take Hart. The idea came from his interest in Colossal Cave Adventure, the genre-defining computer game written by Will Crowther in 1977 for hulking mainframes, and the rising popularity of Dungeons & Dragons in the UK. Dowling was also inspired by the hit radio adaptation of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and wanted Douglas Adams to write for his show, but production on the TV adaptation of his book made it impossible.
The Adventure Game is best described as an early precursor to The Crystal Maze, an inspiration for subsequent shows like the cult classic Knightmare and a pioneering example of the now popular “escape room” concept. In each episode a trio of affordable BBC celebrities were transported, via the magic of chromakey, to the planet Arg where they are tested by the playful but gently sadistic inhabitants, the Argonds. These reptilian beasts occasionally appeared in their natural form, the sort of low budget monster outfit that kept Doctor Who afloat, but were mostly represented in human guise. One character, a cranky Argon uncle, preferred to only appear as that uniquely threatening aspidistra, shaking his leaves furiously at contestants thanks to R2-D2 actor Kenny Baker hiding in its pedestal and rolling it around on a child’s tricycle.
The trio of adventurers would be tasked with a series of logic puzzles, progressing through a series of rooms before facing the terror of the Vortex at the end. Those who survived that ordeal were allowed to return home. Several recurring puzzles revolved around drogna, the Arg currency, consisting of a coded system of coloured shapes where the value depended on the number of sides multiplied by the value of the colour. Like so many aspects of The Adventure Game, this detail was left unexplained both for the contestants and the audience at home.
A product of a gentler TV age, the show is still enormously charming but appears achingly slow to modern eyes. The contestants were left to work things out in their own time, resulting in lengthy sections of the show that involve nothing more than now-forgotten actors and presenters looking confused in long takes with few cuts. Most episodes include at least one occasion where one of the Argond characters has to join them, in character, and all but spell out what they’re supposed to be doing. Although Douglas Adams was unable to work on the series, there’s an unmistakable echo of his mischievous absurd humour running through everything.