5th August 2025
Stairway to the Stars was intended to be number four in the Magic Mirror series. Like its predecessors, Magic Mirror, Nosferatu and Heaven and Hell, It was a text-only adventure game for the Commodore VIC-20 with 8 Kb expansion. It was named after the Blue Öyster Cult song. It was never published (see below), so there is no tape cover to show; but see the Heaven and Hell page for photos of one of the tapes I used in development.
In this game, your goal is to ascend: literally, to climb as high as you can by various means. Starting in a quarry -- maybe a tribute to 1980s Doctor Who? -- it takes you through six distinct locales before you reach your final goal.
The game is finished and playable through to the end, though it does have a few rough edges including three guess-the-noun moments that I'd change now if I could. (Well: I can. But I don't want to, because I'm more interested in preserving a historical artifact than I am in presenting a good game.)
Despite this, and unlike the first two entries in the series, Stairway was never published. More perplexingly, it seems that I never even tried to get it published: when I was hawking Heaven and Hell and Cornucopia around prospective publishers (see the covering letter) I didn't mention Stairway. More mysteriously still, when I rebranded Cornucopia as The Fifth Challenge (which I had done by 14 January 1984, according to the title page of that program) I obviously had Stairway in mind as the fourth, making a series of five. So I really don't know why I wasn't trying to sell it.
Here's what I have available:
The winning screen contains a spoiler, so click through if you want to see it.
This game is the easiest of my four VIC+8k adventures, and for that reason would make a good jumping on point for anyone who, for some reason, wanted to play my old games. It's already easier than Magic Mirror and Nosferatu (and much easier than Heaven and Hell), but it's made easier still by the generous provision of help responses, especially early in the game. I don't remember why I made it so relatively easy: maybe as a reaction against the extreme and unfair difficult of its predecessor.
Stairway also has the distinction of being the longest lost of my games. By the time I was making Cornucopia for the Commodore 64, I doubt I was using the VIC-20 any more, so I probably never loaded Stairway after 1983. When Frank Gasking and his associates first tried to recover the tape that contained the three post-Nosferatu games in 2011, he was quickly successful with Heaven and Hell, and a mildly corrupted version of The Fifth Challenge followed not long after. But Stairway was thought too corrupted to rescue. Through the years several people have had a go, but it wasn't until 1 August 2025 that -- to my total shock! -- Frank sent me a recovered version, which two of his friends had managed to pull from the ancient tape: Tom Roger Skauen created a high-quality WAV file from the degraded tape, and Tommi Lempinen extracted the binary data from this file. My deep gratitude goes out to all three of them.
That means it was about 42 years between the last time I played Stairway on my VIC-20 and the first time I played it on the emulator!
