About Mountain Valley Software

Mountain Valley Software was a small Australian publisher of text adventure games for early home computers, active from 1981 to 1989 according to the Victorian business registration records (#C0233384A). Founded by Brian J. Betts in Boronia, Victoria, the company began on the TRS-80 with Forbidden Valley and The Secret of Flagstone Manor before moving into its better-known Commodore 64 line, where the games became known for distinctive colour character graphics.

This website is a tribute to Mountain Valley Software’s products, their place in Australia’s early microcomputer scene, and the work of Brian J. Betts. It brings together the surviving material for thirteen accounted-for Commodore 64 titles: twelve adventures and The Gambler, a poker game set aboard a Mississippi paddle steamer. These releases were available on cassette or disk, either through a dealer or direct by mail.

Mountain Valley Software did not print years on its packaging, so the dates used throughout the archive come from the games themselves. Twelve of the thirteen Commodore 64 titles carry a copyright year on their loading screen: 1983 for The Oasis of Shalimar, Mystery Island and Castle of Mydor; 1984 for Himalayan Odyssey, The Lost City, The Volcano of Raka-Tua, The Scroll of Akbar Khan and The Gambler; 1985 for Dark Planet, The Secret of Smugglers Inn and Escape from Raka-Tua; and 1986 for The Mermaid and the Crown. Only King Solomon’s Mines gives no year on either its tape or its disk loader.

The printed sources agree with those years and fill the gap. The PC Games advert of October 1984 shows nine titles, with Himalayan Odyssey flagged as the new release — which dates King Solomon’s Mines to 1984 or earlier. The 1986 catalogue fold-out shows eleven titles, adding The Secret of Smugglers Inn and Escape from Raka-Tua. Dark Planet has its own catalogue sheet, while The Mermaid and the Crown appears in neither source and is probably the last title the company shipped. Each game page shows the working behind its own date.

The story of Mountain Valley Software also reaches beyond the Commodore 64 and the TRS-80. Three further adventures — Planet Zandell, Volcano Island, and The Lost Princess — were released for the Spectravideo 328 under the M&M Software name at $26.95 on cassette. A launch advert in PC Games explains the connection, describing the games as M&M Software titles “distributed by Mountain Valley Software.” That advert captions the first title as Planet of Zandell, while the box art reads PLANET ZANDELL; both spellings are contemporary.

These three are not Brian Betts’s work. All three were written by Mark Fitzgerald; Mountain Valley distributed them rather than writing them. All three title screens carry his name — Volcano Island’s and Planet Zandell’s in full, The Lost Princess’s as Copyright by M. Fitzgerald — and they are the only credits on any release held here naming someone other than Betts.

There are also two earlier TRS-80 titles and five known unreleased adventures. Forbidden Valley and The Secret of Flagstone Manor (1981) predate the Commodore 64 catalogue. Only the later program is known to survive, but Brian Betts’s working notebook for both titles does — verb tables with the BASIC line numbers behind each command, abbreviation keys, and hand-drawn grids of every location. Both games have their own page here, with Flagstone Manor’s now carrying a Commodore 64 version converted from the original TRS-80 source.

The unreleased titles — Sorcerers of Ravenswood, Treasure of Dead Man’s Cay, Crypt, The Curse of Cranbury Manor, and Ophir — all boot to a playable opening location, and a disk image of each one survives. Their covers on this site are placeholders rather than original artwork, as no packaging was ever printed.

One important piece of the story is still missing. At the time of writing, Forbidden Valley, Mountain Valley Software’s first known game, does not appear to be preserved in any known retro gaming archive. If you have a copy, I would love to hear from you so this tribute site, online since 2007, can become a more complete record of Mountain Valley Software’s catalogue.

The Commodore 64 disks also carry clues to how the games were made. All fifteen of the single-load disks here, released and unreleased alike, hold one program and a zero-block (C) BRIAN BETTS directory entry, visible when a player loads the disk directory. Two copies are the exception, and prove the rule: the surviving The Oasis of Shalimar and The Gambler both reached this archive by way of a cracking crew, and both had the disk relabelled and exactly that entry stripped.

The Mermaid and the Crown, the last release, is the odd one out and the most interesting disk here. It is still labelled MOUNTAIN VALLEY, but it carries no Betts entry and is not a single program at all: a small MERMAID loader and four CODE files, 257 blocks in all. It is also the only copy-protected disk in the archive — its directory sector points back at itself, and seven tracks past the standard thirty-five hold no readable sectors. Whoever built it had moved well beyond the one BASIC program per disk that every earlier title shipped as.

Across the adventures the shared string PRESS RETURN WHEN DATA ";SM$;" READY. appears byte-for-byte — on every original but The Secret of Smugglers Inn, and in the cracked Oasis disk too — supporting the idea that Betts built one BASIC adventure engine early and reused it across the catalogue. The Gambler, the one release that is not an adventure, carries none of it.

Trivia. A little digging turned up mention of legal correspondence over a copyright disagreement between Mountain Valley Software Pty Ltd and Gameworx Software Pty Ltd about the use of the name King Solomon’s Mines — both companies released a text adventure under that title in 1984.

Finding Mountain Valley Software

A personal recollection from 40 years ago.

My first encounter with Mountain Valley Software was through their advertising. Full-page ads for text adventures appearing in PCG (Personal Computer Games) and APC (Australian Personal Computer) — these magazines were everywhere in 1984, and the ads had a presence you couldn’t miss.

The first time I played one of their games was Mystery Island, on a pirated copy doing the rounds at a local user group. Even then, the simple but distinctive colour keyboard graphics set it apart from everything else on the market. There was something about the way it looked that stuck with you.

Finding Mountain Valley Software in the wild was another matter entirely. Living on the Central Coast, computer stores outside the big chains were few and far between. Word eventually reached us of a small independent store in Hornsby, NSW. During the school holidays of 1985, my mates and I made an afternoon of it — caught the train, an hour or so to Hornsby station, then another stretch on foot to the shop. A minor expedition by today’s standards, but this was how you found things back then.

The store carried a number of their titles, all packaged in what we called hang packs — retail packaging made by a local company called Obecca Pty Ltd, designed to hold cassettes, 5.25″ disks or 3.5″ disks, with a hole punched in the top so they could hang from pegs on the wall. It’s a packaging format that’s vanished completely, but I can still picture those pegs.

Hanging from them that day were Castle of Mydor, The Volcano of Raka-Tua, and King Solomon’s Mines. I bought all three.