Vial of Doom is an interactive text adventure written by Roger M. Wilcox for the TRS-80. The story is based on a 25 page typewritten short story that Wilcox had written a year earlier. Wilcox admitted that his story was influenced a bit by Michael Moorcock’s multiverse.
Wilcox originally thought that the story he had written was way too complicated to turn into a computer game until he read an article about Greg Hassett’s World’s Edge adventure and then became determined to make a game out of the story.
Vial of Doom is the 7th adventure game that Roger M. Wilcox wrote for the TRS-80 in 1980. He considers Vial of Doom to be his first good adventure game, a watershed moment, and 15 more games would inevitably follow.
The interesting thing about all of the games written my Mr. Wilcox is that none of them were released commercially. He finally got around to rewriting his games as WPF .NET applications in 2012 as part of his “remember my past” endeavor. He then made the games available to the public to play whereas before they had only been available for friends and family. I have played his previous six games in the order in which they were written and some of them are better than some of the commercial fare I’ve played. I am thankful that these games are now available to the public.
This game would have been impossible for me to play or finish if I had not taken the time first to read the short story that it is based on. The events which transpire in the game are taken almost verbatim from the story. It would have also been contextually more difficult to operate and understand the “vial of doom” which you’re character is carrying around.
There are not many locations in the game however there are several puzzles to overcome. Getting into the pyramid in the beginning of the game and discovering the “treasure” within is standard adventure game fare and I am sure you can figure things out on your own. Overcoming the puzzles in the other parts of the game are going to involve you using the “vial of doom” in a myriad number of ways. The “vial of doom” is an agent of chaos and you find yourself a pawn now in a much bigger game. Many of the puzzles you’ll easily figure out if you bother to read the short story which the game is based on. There are a couple of minor parser issues where you understand what it is that you need to do but you have to find the right verb but you’ll eventually figure it out.
The next game on tap is going to be Roger M. Wilcox’s last game that he wrote in 1980. He wrote a total of seven games this year and The Poseidon Adventure based on Irwin Allen’s hit movie was the seventh and last game. So when next you hear from me I’ll likely be upside down and underwater.