“Whenever I have a poo, I start to sneeze!”
“Ah-choo!”
“Ah-choo!”
“Ah-choo!”
In the early 1980s, British videogames were pretty weird. Pimania, released by Mel Croucher in 1982 on the ZX Spectrum, had shown that text adventures could stretch beyond clichéd Tolkein-esque fantasy environments, and with the release of Manic Miner in 1983, British videogame surrealism had well and truly hit the mainstream.
The not-quite-so-celebrated Granny’s Garden, released on the BBC Micro in the same year as Manic Miner, also played a significant part in establishing this tradition. It was ostensibly an educational title designed to get children comfortable using computers, and by the mid-late eighties was being played in many school class rooms across the country.
The anti-aliasing still stands the test of time
“Would you like to help the King and Queen?”
> No I can’t be bothered.
“That’s not very nice!”
The plot feels a bit like The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe re-imagined by Hunter S. Thompson but aimed at children learning to read. You have to find the King and Queen’s six missing children while trying to avoid running into the witch who kidnapped them. Along the way you chat with talking toadstools, tame baby dragons, explore mystery cottages, hide in the shell of a snail and fly on the back of a raven. It’s quite the adventure.
That said, today it stands as a shining example of how not to make a videogame. It contains puzzles that can only be solved by brute-force trial and error. The difficulty level spikes all over the place. When you get to searching for the final couple of children, one wrong move leads to instant death, and there’s no sign-posting whatsoever to suggest which move you should make. It is, simply, unfair.
Look it's a tr-witch!
“Ha ha! Now I’ve got you! I will send you home at once!”
Yet when I first played it at the turn of the nineties, I was left in no doubt of its brilliance. Back then, my parents and school teachers were trying to convince me that books could take you on an adventure better than any videogame, but Granny’s Garden made it pretty clear to me that they were lying. How could just words take you on a better adventure than words + pictures + sound + interactivity? The grown-ups simply weren’t making sense: no book had ever let me trick one of the characters into saying that they ate poo, and for me, that would never get old.
I guess I’ve matured a little over time. In the last couple of decades my reading ability has improved, giving me access to some pretty amazing novels. Meanwhile, the stories told in videogames have failed to grow in sophistication at the same rate as my taste. Yet the seed planted by that childish logic is an aspect of my media tastes that I’ve never been able to shake. If you want to be taken on an adventure, surely interactivity helps?
No stereotypical architecture here, move along
“If you wish to use my road, you will have to tell me what kind of trees grow in the forest”
And this is it. At the age of 26, when I find myself sitting at home, playing mediocre games, questioning the meaning of my life and yawning at the clumsy exposition of dull formulaic plots, I know it’s the fault of Granny’s Garden. That self-loathing? The one that sneaks up on me every time I catch myself mindlessly tapping the A button of a plastic controller to open another pointless dialogue box in a game that’s already made clear that it’s got nothing to say to me? Yeah. That’s the fault of Granny’s Garden too. It got my hopes up, took me on a twenty year trip, and now?
I fail to do the decent, sensible thing and switch off the games console.
“I am a HUNGRY GIANT. Shall I eat you?”
They make games featuring giant worms in Japan as well, but they're definitely not for children
I reckon most people who spend a lot of time playing videogames are sensible enough to have given up on the ones that try to tell stories by now. How could anyone not be utterly repulsed by the one hundred hour arrogance of games like Final Fantasy XIII? Isn’t it obvious that, say, watching every single episode of The Sopranos and still having a full day left to play around with would be a better way to spend your time than mastering the combat system and watching the story of a Final Fantasy game?
Apparently not. Like either a fool or a hero, I keep chasing the next elusive title that’s capable of doing something more interesting with its story than the BBC Micro managed almost thirty years ago. And I basically keep my local second hand game shop in business while I do it. But it’s dispiritingly rare that I find a Deus Ex. Or a Dreamfall. Or even a Heavy Rain. Which means – of course – I still can’t tell you whether the insatiable appetite for plot that Granny’s Garden gave me will prove to be the greatest or the worst thing about it.
That’s the end of the adventure
I hope you enjoyed it.
Loving that this was somehow an educational title in primary schools. Was there an agreement between pupils that no-one should let on that it was actually (gasp) fun?
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Justin Leego (October 18th, 2010)