Pimania

Pimania is a text-and-graphics adventure game written by Mel Croucher and released by Automata UK in 1982 for the BBC Micro, ZX Spectrum, Dragon 32, and Sinclair ZX81. It is the first real life video game treasure hunt released in the UK. Automata gave a prize of a golden sundial worth £6,000 for the first person to solve the various cryptic clues to its location that were hidden within Pimania.

ZX81 intro screen

Gameplay

The player negotiates a surreal landscape with the aid of the mysterious Pi-Man, Automata's mascot.[1] The B side of the game cassette features a bizarre Pimania song played on a VL-Tone and vocals. The Pi-Man also stars in his own long-running, surreal, comic-strip, soap opera in the company's adverts on the back page of Popular Computing Weekly magazine and appears in several subsequent games of different kinds.

The sundial was eventually won in 1985 by Sue Cooper and Lizi Newman, who correctly worked out that it could only be found on 22 July (because π is sometimes rounded to 22/7) at the Litlington White Horse on Hindover Hill near Litlington, East Sussex.[2]

Legacy

The BASIC source code listing of the game is available online.[3]

In 2010 Feeding Tube Records, a small label in the United States, released "Pimania: The Music of Mel Croucher & Automata U.K., Ltd.", a deluxe vinyl LP album of the musical B-Sides to the Pimania games, as well as tracks from other Automata releases. The album came with extensive liner notes by Croucher and Caroline Bren, as well as a large poster featuring selections from the original Automata print campaigns and was issued in a one time edition of 500 copies.[4]

References
  1. The Conversation: How punk and Thatcherism came together in the surreal ZX Spectrum Pimania craze
  2. "PiMania – The sundial is revealed!". Computer and Video Games. October 1985. Retrieved 21 November 2020.
  3. Pimania on ZX81stuff.org (2005)
  4. "Pimania: The Music of Mel Croucher & Automata U.K., Ltd." LP on feedingtuberecords.com
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