- For the computer game genre, see Adventure game.
The Adventure Game was a game show, aimed at children but with an adult following, which aired on BBC2 between
1980 and 1986. The story in each show was that the
three celebrity contestants had crash-landed a spaceship on the planet Arg, whose
inhabitants had stolen the crystal needed for the ship to return to Earth. The overall point of the game was to regain this crystal. The programme is often
considered to have been a forerunner of The Crystal
Maze.
The programme came about because Ian
Oliver and Patrick
Dowling shared an interest in Dungeons and Dragons, and
wanted to televise a show that would capture the mood.
The characters
Arg was inhabited by shapeshifter dragons known as Argonds. As a reference to this, most proper nouns in the programme, including Argond, were
anagrams of the word dragon. All Argonds shifted shape within the first few
minutes before the contestants arrived, most to human form to avoid scaring them.
Notable characters within the game included:
- The Rangdo. The Rangdo was the ruler of Arg. In the first series, his human form was played by Ian Messiter, who appeared as an old
professor in a velvet jacket, but in later series, he became the only one of the Argonds not to appear as a dragon. Instead, he
became an aspidistra atop an elegant plant stand; he could move around the room
and roared when he was angry. (The Rangdo was controlled by Kenny Baker, who
was also responsible for R2D2.) Any human meeting the Rangdo had immediately to placate him
with the words "Gronda, gronda, Rangdo". In the last series, the Rangdo ceased to become an aspidistra and started
morphing into a teapot instead.
- Darong (played by newsreader Moira Stuart).
- Gnoard (played by Charmian Gradwell), whose job it was to explain the initial stages of the game to the contestants.
- Dorgan (played by Sarah Lam),
who took over from Gnoard in the final season.
- Gandor (played by Chris
Lever), an ancient half-deaf butler who took the contestants through most of the
puzzles, and refereed the Vortex and Drogna games. In the first series, we saw him without his wig and butler suit.
- Rongad (or rather, Dagnor!) (played by Bill Homewood - though often mistaken for Australian actor Bryan Brown) who would only understand and only speak in reversed English (with an indistinguishable Australian
accent that was supposed to help the contestants realise he was speaking backwards). Noted for habitually singing Waltzing Matilda backwards, and common exclamations of "Doog
yrev!"
- Lesley Judd, known as the Mole, who pretended to be one of the regular contestants but was actually working against them.
Contestants included Bonnie Langford, Keith Chegwin, John Craven,
Sue Cook, Sarah Green, Richard Stilgoe, astronomer Heather Couper,
and Noel Edmonds.
(The credits for the series were quite witty, in that they listed the human characters as being played by Argonds, rather than
the other way round. This explains why, in the first series, one of them has the appearance of future BBC newsreader Moira
Stewart - as played by the Argond Darong.)
Common tasks
The contestants had to complete a number of tasks in order to regain their crystal and return to their ship. Many tasks
involved the drogna, a small transparent plastic disc containing a solid geometric figure, which was the currency of Arg.
The value of a drogna was its numbered position in the visible spectrum multiplied
by the number of sides of the figure. For example, a red circle is worth one unit, an orange circle is worth two units, a red
triangle and a yellow circle are both worth three, and so on.
Tasks which often appeared included:
- A simple computer game where a mouse had to be guided around a maze.
- Belts around the contestants' waists attached to cords tying them to the wall; there was a predictable function governing the
maximum distances of all the cords, which had to be discovered by induction.
- The Drogna Game, which came in the middle of the programme, giving the contestants their opportunity to regain the crystal.
The game is played by two players: one would be a contestant and the other would be a creature known as the Red Salamander of Drazil. This game became so popular that versions of it were released for
home microcomputers.
- The floor is marked out with symbols similar to those described above on drognas; the players stand at opposite sides of the
board, and the crystal is placed in the centre.
- There is a rule determining whether a user is allowed to move from a particular drogna to another drogna. (One common example
is: A player may move to any drogna with the same colour or shape as the one on which they started the turn. For example, you may
move from a red triangle to any red shape or a triangle of any colour.)
- A player may only move to an adjacent drogna. However, a player may move across multiple drognas in one turn provided they
all meet the given criteria. Hence, the drogna on which the player started the turn is not necessarily the drogna they
have immediately left.
- If a player breaks the movement rule, the crystal retracts such that it cannot be taken.
- If a player becomes adjacent to the crystal and it is not taken or retracted, the player may take the crystal.
- If, during the move of the player not carrying the crystal, that player can legally step onto a drogna currently occupied by
the player holding the crystal, they may take the crystal from their opponent. This is known as the Hargreaves Rule.
- A player wins by reaching the edge of the board while carrying the crystal.
- The Vortex. This was the last task in the programme. To return to their ship, the players had to jump between a grid of
points, taking turns with the Vortex, another "player" (shown by a computer-generated flashing column). If the human player
jumped into the Vortex, it would explode and the human, who would lose the game, was said to have been "evaporated". The
important difficulty was that the human player could not see the position of the Vortex on the grid. Players would sometimes be
permitted to buy food with their leftover drognas, and this food could be thrown onto suspect squares to test for the presence of
the Vortex. Milk used in this way would, of course, become evaporated
milk. Being 'evaporated' meant a long trip back to Earth on foot.
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