Ground Zero

The term ground zero describes the point on the surface of the Earth that was closest to a detonation.

In the case of an explosion above the ground, ground zero refers to the point on the ground directly below an occurence of a detonation.

The term has often been associated with nuclear explosions and other large bombs, and is also used in relation to other events such as epidemics and earthquakes.

The term is often re-used for disasters that have a geographic or conceptual epi-centre.

Well back in 1984 it was also the name of a text adventure game available to owners of the ZX Spectrum, Acorn Electron, BBC Micro, Amstrad CPC and Commodore 64, and it dealt with an all too grave subject that was always at the back of your mind during the cold war era...

This adventure game was based upon the events leading up to and surviving a nuclear attack on Great Britain. The aim of the 'game' was to negotiate all the problems expected in such unthinkable circumstances!

The game was set in a typical British suburb and involved collecting all of the items necessary for survival.

Written using the 'Quill' system (which as a useful tool for creating text adventures), it was the final game in the classic 'Adventure' series released by Artic computing, which had begun with 'Adventure A: Planet of Death'.

This game was 'Adventure G' and really finished the series off on a serious, sombre and almost downbeat note.

It picked up quite a lot of publicity due to the subject matter of the game, some of this publicity positive and some of it negative.

Creating a text adventure based on the subject of nuclear war, at the height of the cold war era was always going to raise some eyebrows.

Due to this, despite it never being a true classic of the genre, it is a well remembered game due it being pretty controversial back in the day...

Unsurprisingly the aim of the game was to survive a full scale nuclear attack. You began the game in your own home just as the chaos was beginning.

The locations were well described (this was text only remember and no in-game graphics were present) and built up the atmosphere nicely. You would come across neighbours in shock (I recall a man sitting in a deck chair simply staring into the sky), people looting the local shops, automated emergency broadcasts via the television and telephone and more.

In the usual style of games in this genre you had to find objects, use them appropriately and solve puzzles to advance through the game. Would you build your own shelter or would you try and make to a more secure government bunker? What about food supplies? All of this had to be contended with as you advanced through the game.

You only had a certain amount of moves to make too, meaning you had to find safe haven before the bomb dropped, otherwise it was game over as you were vapourised in the blast.

Not a nice thought.

Despite the rather harrowing atmosphere this game was actually a decent text adventure that played quite well, created a believable atmosphere and did not tend to throw unreasonable puzzles at you (apart from the well known bug in the hallway of your house of not seeing the table with drawer to open).

I remember actually playing this to completion (it took me a good two or three weeks to figure out the whole game) but as you may expect, the ending to the game was cold, scary and utterly bleak. There was more than one way to 'finish' the game, but only one way to survive the blast.

The games author (Colin Smith) deserves a mention for tackling such a sensitive subject within a computer game - and it did make a change from fighting wizards, warriors and orcs.

Not a bad game overall for text adventure enthusiasts.

Colin Smith was a former journalist who decided to sell his house in Dorset to raise the funds to launch this computer adventure game.

Colin was quoted "I thought that participating in the game would bring home to people the horrors of nuclear war more powerfully than any film or book,"

He also intended the game to highlight what he considered the inadequacies of the Government Protect and Survive civil defence scheme.

I must say that the game certainly achieved it's objective.