The Adventure Game

For the computer game genre, see Adventure game.

The Adventure Game was a game show, aimed at children but with an adult following, which aired on BBC2 between 1980 and 1986. The story in each show was that the three celebrity contestants had travelled by space ship to the planet Arg. Their overall task varied with each series. For example, the team might be charged with finding a crystal needed to power their ship for to return to Earth. The programme is often considered to have been a forerunner of The Crystal Maze.

The programme came about because Ian Oliver and Patrick Dowling shared an interest in Dungeons and Dragons, and wanted to televise a show that would capture the mood. The programme shares a similar sci-fi feel to the work of Douglas Adams, partly because the producers wanted to do a game show of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy book and radio series but Adams had already agreed a straight-to-TV adaptation.

The characters

Arg was inhabited by shapeshifter dragons known as Argonds. As a reference to this, most proper nouns in the programme, including Argond, were anagrams of the word dragon. All Argonds shifted shape within the first few minutes before the contestants arrived, most to human form to avoid scaring them.

Notable characters within the game included:

• The Rangdo. The Rangdo was the ruler of planet Arg. In the first series, his human form was played by Ian Messiter, who appeared as an old professor in a velvet jacket, but in later series he became the only one of the Argonds not to appear as a dragon. Instead, he became an aspidistra atop an elegant plant stand; he could move around the room and roared when he was angry. (The Rangdo was controlled by Kenny Baker, who was also responsible for R2-D2.) Any human meeting the Rangdo had immediately to placate him with a bow or courtsey while uttering the phrase "Gronda, gronda". In the last series, the Rangdo changed into a teapot instead, often spouting steam when displeased.
• Darong (played by actress Moira Stuart, who later became a BBC newsreader).
• Gnoard (played by Charmian Gradwell), whose job it was to explain the initial stages of the game to the contestants.
• Dorgan (played by Sarah Lam), who took over from Gnoard in the final season.
• Gandor (played by Chris Lever), an ancient half-deaf butler who took the contestants through most of the puzzles, and refereed the Vortex and Drogna games. In the first series, we saw him without his wig and butler suit.
• Rongad (or rather, Dagnor!) (played by Bill Homewood - though often mistaken for Australian actor Bryan Brown) who spoke English backwards and could only understand the contestants if they did the same. His accent was Australian and a mild clue to help the contestants realise he was speaking backwards. Noted for habitually singing Waltzing Matilda in reverse, and exclamations of "Doog yrev!" when the contestants did well.
• Lesley Judd, known as the Mole, who pretended to be one of the regular contestants but was actually working against them.

Contestants included Keith Chegwin, Sue Cook, astronomer Heather Couper, John Craven, Paul Darrow, Noel Edmonds, Sarah Greene, Bonnie Langford and Richard Stilgoe.

(The credits for the series were quite witty, in that they listed the human characters as being played by Argonds, rather than the other way round. This explains why, in the first series, one of them has the appearance of future BBC newsreader Moira Stewart - as played by the Argond Darong.)

Common tasks

The contestants had to complete a number of tasks in order to achieve their overall goal (e.g. regain their crystal and return to their ship). Many tasks involved the drogna, a small transparent plastic disc containing a solid geometric figure, which was the currency of Arg. The value of a drogna was its numbered position in the visible spectrum multiplied by the number of sides of the figure. For example, a red circle is worth one unit, an orange circle is worth two units, a red triangle and a yellow circle are both worth three, and so on.

Tasks which often appeared included:

• A simple computer game where a mouse had to be guided around a maze.
• Belts around the contestants' waists attached to cords tying them to the wall; there was a predictable function governing the maximum distances of all the cords, which had to be discovered by induction.
• The Drogna Game, which came in the middle of the programme, giving the contestants their opportunity to regain the crystal. The game is played by two players: one would be a contestant and the other would be a creature known as the Red Salamander of Drazil. This game became so popular that versions of it were released for home microcomputers.
  • The floor is marked out with symbols similar to those described above on drognas; the players stand at opposite sides of the board, and the crystal is placed in the centre.
  • There is a rule determining whether a user is allowed to move from a particular drogna to another drogna. (One common example is: A player may move to any drogna with the same colour or shape as the one on which they started the turn. For example, you may move from a red triangle to any red shape or a triangle of any colour.)
  • A player may only move to an adjacent drogna. However, a player may move across multiple drognas in one turn provided they all meet the given criteria. Hence, the drogna on which the player started the turn is not necessarily the drogna they have immediately left.
  • If a player breaks the movement rule, the crystal retracts such that it cannot be taken.
  • If a player becomes adjacent to the crystal and it is not taken or retracted, the player may take the crystal.
  • If, during the move of the player not carrying the crystal, that player can legally step onto a drogna currently occupied by the player holding the crystal, they may take the crystal from their opponent. This is known as the Hargreaves Rule.
  • A player wins by reaching the edge of the board while carrying the crystal.
• The Vortex. This was the last task in the programme. To return to their ship, the players had to jump between a grid of points, taking turns with the Vortex, another "player" (shown by a computer-generated flashing column). If the human player jumped into the Vortex, it would explode and the human, who would lose the game, was said to have been "evaporated". The important difficulty was that the human player could not see the position of the Vortex on the grid. Players would sometimes be permitted to buy food with their leftover drognas, and this food could be thrown onto suspect squares to test for the presence of the Vortex. Milk used in this way would, of course, become evaporated milk. Being 'evaporated' meant a long trip back to Earth on foot.

External links

• The BBC's own site (http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/ilove/tv/adventuregame/)
• Reviews (http://www.ukgameshows.com/atoz/programmes/a/adventure_game/)
• Signature tune (http://tv.cream.org/specialassignments/themes/adv_game.mp3) (later series)
• The programme's page at the Internet Movie Database (http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0283701/)