Premise

You saw it at a car boot sale: a vintage computer, heavy, chunky, truly old school, and a model you had never heard of? This was too much for a computerphile like yourself to resist! You could barely wait to explore this exotic system, the seller's caveat of strange visual glitches only maxxing your curiosity...

Content Warnings

Murder, Ghosts, Adultery, Demons, Swearing, Lewd ASCII art, Insults, Northern Ireland, Prison, Alcohol, Tribute Bands.

Game Information

This game was created for ECTOCOMP 2026.

A Z-code interpreter is needed to play this game. Some commonly used interpreters are: Frotz, Gargoyle and Lectrote. For a full list visit: https://www.ifwiki.org/Z-code_interpreters

The bulk of the game involves interacting with an old computer, and reading the various files that can be found on it, which will slowly reveal the story of what happened over twenty years ago.

Once logged on, you enter commands to the computer, similar to using MS-DOS or a Linux terminal. Note that the standard "SAVE", "RESTORE", "RESTART" and "QUIT" commands are also available, as well as "ABOUT", "NOTES" and "VERSION".

There is a "HINT" command which generally gives you a recap of nodes which you have visited or have learned about, and it sometimes gives advice on what you need to do at certain parts of the game.

Credits

All writing and coding by Andrew Apted.

No generative AI has been used to develop this game.

Many thanks to my testers: rh, Jade.

The cover was created by the author, using a public domain photograph of a circuit board sourced from Wikimedia commons.