The Causes of Chaos

3rd May 2005

The Causes of Chaos is a multi-player adventure game for the Commodore 64 that I wrote in 1984 or '85. So it's more than two decades old. Here, I have gathered everything of it that I've been able to recover, with the sterling help of various citizens of the flourishing retro-gaming community.

I have:

• An image of the original game is available for download as a C64 tape-image file. I found this image, pirated, out there on the Internet. The people who did it rather sneakily removed my name, and that of the publisher, from the cracked version that's in circulation, so I've restored them in this version of the image; but if you want the cracked version, you can have it - my feeling is that if it weren't for these people stealing my game, I wouldn't have a running version of it myself. So they can have some credit.

  The tape image can be used with a Commodore 64 emulator such as the excellent VICE, available in various forms including as a Debian package.

• An MP3 of the vaguely baroque-sounding title music that I wrote for Causes of Chaos, and coded up using a program called Master Composer.

• Thanks to Jacob Gunness (also the author of the complete solution, see below), I now have not one but two classic reviews of the game from the days of its release - neither of them very enthusiastic, unfortunately, but in the interests of integrity, here they are:
  • Keith Campbell's review from the April 1986 issue of Computer and Video Games. In the mid-eighties, C&VG was like a bible for computer games, and in the area of Adventure games, Campbell's word was law. So I'm glad he gave me higher scores than his comments indicated. Thanks to Jacob for sending the scan.

  • A preview and review from Zzap!64, a younger and trendier magazine that ran at about the same time. Thanks again to Jacob, this time for alerting me to a web-page I'd not known about.

    (Just in case that page ever goes away, I have made a copy of the preview and review text for posterity.)

• Some notes on the history of The Causes of Chaos.

• Some hints to help you solve the game. You can read these either in the clear or hidden, with the hints themselves in white on a white background, so that you can't see the answers to the questions unless you select the text.

• An ASCII-art map of the Causes of Chaos world.
  Also available in HTML at various sizes:
  • Normal
  • Small
  • Tiny
  • Microscopic
  (Some of these may appear to be the same size, depending on how broken your web browser is.)

• A complete solution, found on the web at http://solutionarchive.com/Causes_of_Chaos.txt (the local copy is just in case it ever drops off the web.) Congratulations to Jacob Gunness for solving it!

• A video walkthrough by Dan Warren, from YouTube. Thanks, Dan!

• Some random trivia about the game.

• An embryonic Causes of Chaos reimplementation using sac, the Scott Adams Compiler. I'm planning to work this up into a full reimplementation pretty soon, auto-generating the objects and perhaps the locations from the pirated copy I mentioned above.

  You can download both the source file, and the compiled data file, ready to be used with interpreters such as ScottFree.