The History of Text Adventures in Swedish

By Fredrik Ekman

Previously published (in Spanish) in CAAD #62.

The market for text adventures in Swedish was never very big. Sweden has a comparatively small population, and most people speak English well, meaning that the larger part of the market belonged to English-language games from companies such as Infocom, Melbourne House, Level 9 and others. And most Swedes who made their own adventures made them in English, either because they were used to playing in English, or because they thought they would have a bigger market that way.

Even so, the Swedish-language text adventure does have a vibrant and interesting history. This history can be divided into four distinct periods.

The First Period – Stuga

The first period consists of but a single game, Stuga (Cottage), a game inspired by the original Adventure, but in a considerably more humourous vein. Stuga was originally created as early as 1978 on a mainframe at an educational institute, and it may very well have been the first ever text adventure in any language other than English. The programmers, brothers Kimmo and Viggo Eriksson along with Olle Johansson, were only 10, 12 and 14 years old at the time, something which can be seen in a few pubertal jokes in the game. They had access to the computer because their parents worked there, and the game was coded in BASIC.

The Swedish word “stuga” normally refers to a very small countryside cottage, often with only one or two rooms. But the cottage in the game is surreal. On the outside, it is tiny, but on the inside it has nine large floors, an elevator, and an underground system of caverns. Rooms, events and items are also often surreal, and do not always follow normal laws of physics or logic.

By the mid 1980s, the game had become something of a cult classic. It was picked up by the company Scandinavian PC Systems (who until that time had made utilities and corporate software, but wanted to branch out) and in 1986 they published a version for MS-DOS with the title Stugan (The Cottage). According to the programmers, royalty profits were small, but the game was hugely popular in piracy circles, so it was very widely circulated.

Translated versions of Stugan were also released in English, Norwegian and Danish.

Perhaps it was due to the influence of Stuga/Stugan that more than a few games of the second period were written in a humourous style.

The Second Period – The Eighties

The second period is the golden age of Swedish text adventures, at least in terms of the number of games released. It lasted through the 1980s and one or two years into the 90s, and therefore encompasses the commercial release of Stugan.

The majority of games from this period were published either as magazine listings, or as freeware in various software libraries, Bulletin Board Systems, etc. Some were also sold directly by their programmers through classified ads in computer magazines or fanzines. It is not known exactly how many existed, but I am aware of about two or three dozen games from this period.

A number of early games were translated from English. Mostly, these were sample listings from programming books or magazine articles. For example, the two VIC-20 games Graffs and Dungeon, possibly the second and third text adventures in Swedish, were on a cassette that accompanied Andrew Collin’s book Introduction to BASIC, Part 2. Another was Mardrömsplaneten (Nightmare Planet) from Mike Grace’s book Commodore 64 Adventures. Both the book and the game were translated into Swedish in 1983 (probably the only book in Swedish entirely about text adventures). Unfortunately, the anonymous translator was so bad that the game, if typed as printed, would crash upon start, and it required considerable debugging before a working version could be extracted from the book.

One game that needs to be mentioned, although not primarily because of any literary or technical qualities, is the James Bond pastiche Agent 999 from 1984. It was written for the Spectravideo and published as a listing in the computer magazine Allt om Hemdatorer. The writer of this article converted the game to the Commodore 64 for private use, and many years later uploaded it to the Internet on popular request. It has since received some limited fame because, according to video game historian Thomas Sunhede, the game was the first published Swedish video game (of any kind) written by a woman. Unfortunately, the author Kajsa Söderström suffered from mental illness and committed suicide before she could receive recognition for this important milestone. In 2023, Fredrik Åberg translated the game into English, and that version is available under the same title at the Internet Archive (archive.org).

Another magazine listing, this one considerably more ambitious, was published 1985 in the magazine VIC Rapport. The game Virus by Åke Hedman was for VIC-20 with 16K expansion, but had no connection with computer viruses (that term barely existed at the time). Instead, the game was set in a hospital environment and the player, taking the role of a doctor, had to go around and try to cure the patients, or at least reduce their suffering. This is a forgotten gem of the period that deserves to be rediscovered.

A notable 1985 game was the first Swedish version of Will Crowther and Don Woods’ original Adventure, titled Äventyr. Written for the ZX Spectrum, it was not, strictly speaking, a translation, but rather a recreation, because the programmer Jacob Munkhammar made it based on his experiences playing the original game, without access to any source code.

In addition to Scandinavian PC Systems, I am only aware of one other Swedish company that produced text adventures commercially. AB Datorer & Son (Computers & Son, Inc.) released about half a dozen adventures under their software label XCellent, and at least three of them were in Swedish: Herrgården (The Mansion), Jakten i Knäckebröhult (The Chase in Knäckebröhult) and De vises sten (The Philospher’s Stone), all three with clear fantasy elements. These were all created by Clas Kristiansson using The Quill. Kristiansson was a well-known Swedish programmer and computer journalist, who specialized in adventure games. As far as I know, these games were not sold through software retailers. Herrgården, for example, was on a cover tape for the games magazine Joystick. One of Kristiansson’s English adventures deserves to be mentioned, namely the Spectrum adventure Black Gnome. Kristiansson chose to write the game in English partly because he wanted to sell it internationally, but mostly because The Quill had no support for Swedish characters. The game had a sort-of commercial distribution through the computer magazine Allt om Hemdatorer.

Other than the XCellent games, very few Swedish adventures were created with an authoring system One of the more prominent is the quilled game 99Y, released in 1986 (some sources incorrectly say 1984) by brothers Martin and Staffan Vilcans. It is a parodic science fiction game where you have to save the earth from destruction.

Among the more ambitious Swedish games from the 1980s is Bilbo by Nils Eng, a 1989 freeware program for MS-DOS. It is an adaptation of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, although it is based on the “alternate reality” that Bilbo was the one chosen to carry the ring to Mount Doom.

Svenska Äventyrsklubben (The Swedish Adventure Club), was a non-commercial organization for players and creators of text adventures. It was active from 1984 and into the 1990s. SÄK, as it was commonly called amongst members, ran a BBS and published the fanzine Äventyr (Adventures).

Several members produced their own games and sold them through the club. One that deserves to be mentioned is Flykten (The Escape) from 1987. Written for the C64 by Fredrik Ramsberg and Johan Berntsson, it is about a prison breakout and it features a multi-word parser that must have been one of the most impressive for any Swedish game before the days of Inform. It was also large, with about 130 rooms and 30 independent Hobbit-style characters.

Towards the end of the period, father and son Sebastian and Nikolaj Marquez released three fantasy games for the Amiga that were also sold through SÄK. The games were Demonen (The Demon), En gamling på äventyr (An Old Man’s Adventures) and Magikerns uppdrag (The Magician’s Quest). These had fairly simple problems and two-word parser, and would perhaps not have been remembered today if it had not been for their fine, impressionistic graphics.

The Third Period – SÄK Revived

I am not aware of a single Swedish text adventure that was released in the mid 1990s, but in 1998, SÄK was briefly revived by Jacob Munkhammar as a mailing list and a web site. The web site still exists, although it is no longer being updated. Munkhammar also worked on his own authoring system, Cave, for Macintosh, but it was probably never released to the public, and as far as I know only a handful of Cave games of Munkhammar’s own creation were ever released, such as Vilse (Lost), which was an updated version of a game originally created for the Spectrum in the 1980s.

In 1998, Munkhammar released a new translation of the original Adventure, again titled Äventyr, but this time he based the translation on original source code from a 430-point version by Woods. It was thus the first “proper” Swedish translation of Adventure. It was only available for Macintosh.

Around the time of the revival, the Swedish text adventure had a brief renaissance, with a handful of games, probably about ten in all, released for Macintosh or PC, mostly distributed as freeware over the Internet. Beside Cave, one other authoring system, also for Macintosh, was written during this period. It was called MicroAdventure, but as far as I know its developer Jörgen Carlsson was the only one who ever released any adventures for it. His most ambitious project was the two-part graphic adventure Tharangors hämnd (The Vengeance of Tharangor).

Also in this period, Nils Eng released Bilbo in a new version, re-titled Härskarringen (The Ruling Ring), where Frodo took the protagonist’s role.

The Fourth Period – Inform

Inform is a development platform for text adventures in the style of Infocom games, created by Graham Nelson. With Inform 6, support was added for non-English games, which required a specific library for each language. In 2006, Fredrik Ramsberg released such a library for Swedish, which sparked another brief period of Swedish text adventure development.

As far as I know, less than ten Swedish-language Inform adventures have been released in public. The most prolific writer is Johan Berntsson, best known for his fantasy adventures Drakmagi (Dragon Magic) and Vanyar. The former is written in the style of Infocom’s Enchanter series, with a similar magic system. The latter was originally written in BASIC for the C64 in the second period, but was updated and improved for the Inform version. Both these adventures, in addition to their Inform releases, have also been converted into Glulx, for release with graphics; in the case of Vanyar, these are the character graphics from the C64 version.

In 2007, Fredrik Ramsberg released the third translation of Adventure. It was based on Graham Nelson’s English 1994 Inform verision of Woods’ classic 350-point version, and is very close to the original.

The source code for the first Swedish game, Stuga, had been thought lost forever, but in the early 2000s, the final version of the mainframe game was discovered amongst other archived material from the old mainframe. Fredrik Ramsberg and Johan Berntsson converted the code into Inform, and the game was released anew in 2009. Thus, Stuga can be said to enclose the entire history of the Swedish text adventure game.

Along with the re-release of Stuga, the latest text adventure I have been able to find in Swedish is Cacharens dilemma (The Geocacher’s Quandary) by Johan Ottosson, a slice-of-life adventure released in 2009, where the protagonist must juggle his priorities between work and his geocaching hobby.

To the best of my knowledge, no Swedish adventures have been released since, and now we are eagerly awaiting the advent of the fifth period.