Heaven and Hell

1st June 2025

Heaven and Hell was intended to be number three in the Magic Mirror series. Like its predecessors, Magic Mirror and Nosferatu, It was a text-only adventure game for the Commodore VIC-20 with 8 Kb expansion. It was named after the Black Sabbath song. (This is the sort of stuff I was into in those days,and to be fair I think the album stands up well today.)

The idea was to start on the Earth, get yourself killed and thus progress to Heaven, and eventually find Jacob's Ladder, which could be climbed down into Hell. The object of the game was to restore Faustus's lost soul to him. (My theology has moved on a bit since then!) It was intended to be the most difficult of the series, with one innocent mistake early on preventing completion at a much later stage. Back in 1983, that felt like a clever twist rather than a violation of the player's rights.

Although I got the game into as finished a state as the first two in the series, somehow it never got published. I can't really remember now exactly what happened more than 40 years ago, but based on the covering letter below, it seems that I'd become dissatisfied with Terminal's lack of advertising for the first two games, and started looking for a different publisher for this and Cornucopia, evidently without success.

Here's what I have available:

• The typewritten letter that I sent with copies of Heaven and Hell and Cornucopia -- unfortunately undated, and with no recipient specified. Earnest in the way only a fourteen-year-old nerd can achieve.
• A typewritten specification sheet for Heaven and Hell including a synopsis of the plot. The location count of 24 is incorrect: there are 31 locations (and 29 objects). Notice how proud I was of the unfair elements.
• The game itself, in a BASIC listing.
• heaven-side1.tap, the tape image, which can be loaded into some emulators.
• heaven.prg -- the game file, which can also be loaded into some emulators: this is the version to use if your emulator supports it, as it's much smaller than the tape file and loads much more quickly. (Thanks to Frank Gasking for converting this.)
• Hints for the puzzles, in the style of Infocom invisiclues.
• My map of the game, drawn in raw ASCII.
• A complete solution.

I would like to show you the screen that you get when you win, but it contains a massive spoiler. So instead, you'll have to click through if you want to see it.

This game involves a lot of guess-the-verb and even guess-the-noun. It's also extremely Cruel in the Zarfian sense: it's very easy to softlock yourself out of victory even right at the start. I have no excuse. As far as I can see from code-reading, though, there is only actual bug in this game. When you are standing at the gates of Hell, you can give objects to the Devil even before you have summoned him there.