Swordquest: EarthWorld (Atari 2600)

The Swordquest series from Atari presented a fascinating idea to gamers at the time: solve the game’s cryptic riddles, and you could have a chance to earn prizes worth thousands of dollars. No doubt many young children were hooked by this premise, believing they had a shot at snagging the glistening golden Talisman of Penultimate Truth that would be awarded to the player who figured out Swordquest: EarthWorld. Adorned with diamonds and all 12 birthstones, the prize was worth $25,000, more than enough to offset the buy-in of purchasing the video game. Players young and old with treasure in their eyes popped the cartridge in their system, ready to play a game that doubled as an incredible sweepstakes… only to find the “game” element was barely a consideration, Swordquest: EarthWorld a cavalcade of grueling tasks and constant blind guessing. Even the people who would go on to win the contest would often admit later they unraveled the riddle mostly through luck or tedious experimentation.

Swordquest: EarthWorld was clearly not designed to be an enjoyable game to complete, and while you might think that ties to the fact someone can get a great reward for doing so, simply beating the game isn’t how you enter the sweepstakes. In Swordquest: EarthWorld, you need to perform specific actions to make a pair of numbers briefly flash on screen, these serving as clues that tie to an included comic book that actually had a good deal of work put into it. The tie-in comic tells of a pair of twins, Tarra and Tor, who live on the lam in a fantasy kingdom. King Tyrannus, fearing for his safety after the dark portents shared with him by the wizard Konjuro, had hoped to slay the twins in infancy after a prophecy that they would kill Tyrannus when he was old and feeble. Their parents sacrifice their lives to get the twins into hiding, but as adults, they are drawn back towards the castle and uncover the wizard’s jewel, it containing helpful mages who task the twins with conquering different realms to gain strength and learn lessons so they can stand up to the wizard and king. The first of these realms is EarthWorld, and while this would be a respectable place to stop to lead into the game, you actually see them tackle EarthWorld’s trials, encountering rooms and creatures based on the Zodiac. The comic is actually a fairly lengthy fantasy adventure that tells its own tale and has a good degree of effort put into the art, but its purpose when it comes to the game is hiding secrets in its pages. Those numbers you find in game can correspond to pages and panels, but the puzzle is not entirely straightforward as you need to crack the code on how to use the numbers. By now the contest is long passed, explanations exist online of what the solution is, but the comic isn’t a bad read and it can be fun to try and spot hidden words even though some are indeed red herrings that would require knowledge from the game to properly dismiss.

The comic is definitely the best thing about Swordquest: EarthWorld, because when you start the game, you are thrown into a colorful maze that doesn’t make the most logical sense. Rooms have four possibles exits, not all of them always usable but they are identical besides their color and yet it’s very difficult to get a sense for the layout of the maze. With 12 rooms to line up with the Greek Zodiac, the rooms are already underwhelming in their barrenness after seeing giant crab battles in the comic. Heading south can eventually bring you to the same room that you would have gone to had you gone east earlier, the wraparounds a bit difficult to commit to memory and most attempts to map it I’ve found have been sloppy or just accept being deceptive in their layout since trying to conceptualize it as a true space feels like a fool’s errand. The rooms you are in are incredibly important though, because the main task in Swordquest: EarthWorld is to enter rooms to pick-up or drop items, most of these spaces not serving a purpose beyond being one of many repositories for the various pick-ups you find on your adventure. You can only carry a handful of items at one time, and unfortunately, the point behind a great deal of them is to just drop them on the floor and hope you might trigger a number code by scattering objects around the maze in the exact way the game wants you to.

Swordquest: EarthWorld doesn’t want to give up its secrets easily, so it decides to have most of the item arrangements necessary for revealing number codes to be almost without logic. You might think the comic would offer some clues, frequently throughout it you see items mentioned explicitly by name as ways to overcome a room’s trials even though most of those trials are completely absent in video game form. However, these rarely are true hints to what to do in game, and while a few codes are given for only getting an item or two right, there are codes that can require you to place 15 items in the perfect rooms to display the code. Even if you don’t care for the contest, the game’s ending, where you’re given a sword to mark your success, still requires triggering all ten code reveals, and with there being no in-game clues or much logic in how items tie to Zodiac rooms, it will ultimately be just a lot of dropping items in places and hoping, especially since rooms are used across multiple codes with different item arrangements. Utterly confusing, absolutely tedious, aimless and unsatisfying, trying to trigger the codes barely qualifies as an activity, the activity about as fun as guessing a number between 1 and 10,000 with no clue on if you’re higher or lower with your guesses. There is no feedback unless you have managed to put in the right answer, no alteration to the world based on your actions, and no identifiable logic at times, the game limiting your inventory feeling like a particularly cruel touch since it just means more tromping around the obtuse maze and hoping you guessed right this time.

Swordquest: EarthWorld does feature some more involved moments of play though, but none of them are truly enjoyable. Four rooms feature what amount to minigames, the player needing to clear these games to be able to place or take items in a room. Leo’s room features “waterfalls”, large rainbow barriers rising or falling and you need to walk forward to pass through a small gap that becomes increasingly harder to clear as the next waterfall ahead moves more quickly. Touch the waterfall and you’re back to the start, this an unfortunately common trend taken up by all other rooms. Taurus’s room of daggers and Sagittarius’s room of arrows are basically the same trial but with different projectiles, the player trying to weave through small gaps in rooms filled with danger to reach the other side. It is incredibly difficult to do however, and in fact, it’s not really meant to be done, the player able to grab items that can make you invulnerable to such dangers or give you the ability to skip them entirely and just swap out items. Of course, carrying such items takes up inventory space and you’ll inevitably need to leave helpful tools in other rooms to trigger code reveals, so there can be times you might throw yourself at these, although you’ll want the item that makes Taurus’s attacks even visible so that’s another burden on your beleaguered carrying capacity. The raft room at Aquarius is actually the rare moment a reasonable challenge seems to be presented to you. You hop onto moving rafts in the water and need to time your leaps between them properly to reach the other side. It’s still aggravating, windows for success small, failure leading to a full restart of the room, and your leap feels a touch delayed so you need to learn how to factor that into your crossing, but it at least feels doable and free of item requirements. It would probably be an annoying element if it was in some other game, but here being a bit awful instead of utterly abhorrent is a step up from most of what you’ll be experiencing.

It is a bit funny items like the Cloak of Invisibility and Leather Armor work to invalidate the more interactive side of the game, these tools for more easily clearing rooms ultimately meaning you’re going to spend more time with the thankless dull guesswork that is dropping off items and hoping for the best. The fact that some of the clues are just fakeouts to make the contest harder only makes all the effort you’d put into trying to uncover the codes feel even more hollow, and honestly, just searching the comic panels for hidden words, combining them into phrases that almost make sense, and sending them out to Atari would have probably been a more effective approach than sinking hours into the game hoping your next random distribution of items might be what the game is hoping for. Even if you did solve it, the players who figured it out were flown out to compete in a custom version of Swordquest: EarthWorld with new clues that sounded just as arcane based on player interviews after the fact. Swordquest: EarthWorld doesn’t really feel like it’s aiming to be played as a real game though, too much of its design tied to obfuscating necessary information for a limited time contest, the code cracking not enjoyable on its own merits because Atari was far too focused on making it difficult rather than attaching it to an enjoyable game as an extra layer for those looking for something novel.

THE VERDICT: Swordquest: EarthWorld is a glorified contest entry form, although that is an unfair comparison because filling out a form probably offers more entertainment value. That quick and easy process, the little hope you’ll get picked, that offers far more substance than trying to parse the nonsensical item arrangements necessary to make codes that aren’t even all useful to appear here, and while there are minigames at times, most are designed to be frustrating or exist almost just to force you to carry items in a game where shuffling them around is already slow and tedious because of your limited carrying space. Including a well illustrated comic book at least meant you had something to hold your attention for a bit, but the almost non-existent logic to the object delivery chore that is Swordquest: EarthWorld means you’d have a better time with lotto scratchers than this agonizing attempt at a video game contest.

And so, I give Swordquest: EarthWorld for Atari 2600…

An ATROCIOUS rating. You can convince people to do awful things with the promise of riches, and in this case, many people were suckered into playing a game with little redeeming value beyond actually helping you potentially earn a piece of treasure in real life. You would have to spend a good deal of time trying to parse a game that only pretends its riddles make sense, you’d have to take those moments to play the terrible minigames when you can’t bring in the items to skip past their tedious designs, and even then those poor players who did all that were thrown into a limited time contest at Atari HQ where you probably weren’t going to be able to figure out the newly reshuffled nonsense. Congratulations to Steven Bell for putting up with so much for your prize, but whether the contest was ongoing or not, it doesn’t change the fact that Swordquest: EarthWorld wasn’t designed to be enjoyable. It was made to block as many people as possible from figuring out a code phrase, but it’s not even the last game to include contests of this sort and future ones at least found out better ways to include them. For example, making a good game and then having the contest be hidden secrets only for those who really dig deep into elements that normal players might not even notice. Every part of Swordquest: EarthWorld is about barring you from getting closer to the truth, and it’s not in the way some group might use extreme tactics to deny you knowledge of their conspiracy in some exciting fictional story. Here it’s like being in the line at the DMV and constantly getting told you didn’t fill out the right forms for your request, but you’re also not told which forms and turning in any wrong forms along with the right ones doesn’t even lead to helpful hints on where you went right.

The contest around Swordquest: EarthWorld and the included comic are what are interesting about this video game, but playing it is a chore and a bore. I would say that you’re better off saving your mental energy for more satisfying puzzles found elsewhere, but that would imply you’re solving puzzles here. This is like trying to figure out a completely random combination on some stranger’s luggage, attempting to think intelligently about it just wastes time and all you can do is put in the work to eventually solve it. A horrendous start for this experiment on making video games into contests with prizes, it’s a marvel Atari was even allowed to put out two more Swordquest titles after this sad excuse for interactive entertainment.