Retro Game Of The Week: The Mystery Of Silver Mountain (Book)

Back when I were a young’un, we didn’t have free-to-play games riddled with in-app purchases. We had to type in our games, one buggy line of code at a time…

In Retro Game Of The Week I pull a game from my collection and write about why it’s important or interesting. Or in some cases, badly dated and rubbish.

I haven’t done a retro game of the week for quite some time now, but I felt kind of compelled to do so for this week’s title, which is, frankly, quite different to everything else I’ve covered in the retro gaming space at Alex Reviews Tech to date.

You see, while The Mystery Of Silver Mountain does count as a game, this isn’t something that you play by slotting in a cartridge, sliding in a CD or even pressing play on a tape drive to speak of.

It’s a book.

A book: Bits of squished up tree with ink on them.
For the younger audience, like a Kindle, but it never needs recharging.

Way back in the day, Usborne published a whole range of computing game books that all worked around the concept of teaching youngsters – or the young at heart – how to code, mostly in BASIC.

Why BASIC? Partly because it’s BASIC to learn (ho ho), but mostly because while there were a host of competing computer platforms (C64, Spectrum, Amstrad, BBC, etc, etc…) nearly all of them had some form of BASIC built in.

It would have been smart publishing work, because you could commission a book once and then (with maybe some minor edits to cover off BASIC differences between platforms) you could sell the same book to just about every home computer user.

However, this was also the era where computer games really exploded into the consciousness of young people everywhere, so just coding itself wasn’t going to be enough.

We demanded GAMES, and so Usborne delivered with a series of titles that had the promise that you’d be able to create your own computer space games, spy games, fantasy games, weird games… a title for every niche, it seems.

Recently (and quite by a weird coincidence that for privacy reasons I can’t go into), I ended up with one of them, specifically The Mystery Of Silver Mountain, list price £1.95, first published in 1984, and mine seems to be a first edition!

RICH! I’LL BE RICH, THESE RETRO GAME THINGS ARE WORTH A FORTUNE NOW!!!

Or… not.

Best eBay estimates for actually sold copies run about $30, which isn’t terrible given most retro games lose value over time, but the other catch there is that The Mystery Of Silver Mountain is one of a range of Usborne titles that the company made free to download in PDF form some years back.

Want a copy, as well as copies of Computer Fun or Weird Computer Games? Knock yourself out at this link.

While many of the other Usborne books had small intros and then page after page of code, The Mystery Of Silver Mountain spends a lot of time setting the scene and laying out the “world” of the game in a way that not too many games do these days in a manual sense.

Of its 32 pages, fully 17 of them are just setting the scene with some fun illustrations to get you in the mood for some coding.

I cannot go east. Clearly the original programmers must have been Pet Shop Boys fans.

Quite a bit of coding, in fact; 489 lines of code (a lot for its time, don’t scoff, youngsters) plus extra code lines or alterations depending on whether you’re typing it into a Commodore 64, VIC 20, TRS80, Apple II, Electron or Spectrum. Like I said, Usborne liked to cover its bases.

You’re probably wondering how long it took me to type all 489 lines of code in, aren’t you?

The answer is… about five seconds, because I totally didn’t, because this is 2025, and I’ve got better things to do than type in 489 lines of code, plus any debugging that might be needed along the way.

I 100% cheated, doing an online search that revealed a number of ways to play it in a browser; in my case I opted for the version at the BBC Micro Archive.

It’s… not much of a game, but then you can tell that by looking at the code, because what it’s really creating is a very simple database of locations along with the code needed to set up a simple object parser to allow you to move around the world and interact in some pretty limited ways with them.

I have eaten some bread, because it’s one of the limited number of things I can actually do.

Hey, it was 1984, this was still a relatively nascent field and I have no doubt that it probably did spark some early coders into tweaking the code beyond the obvious “change all the Orcs into farts heheheheheh” way. That was the ultimate intent of these books, after all; get the parents to buy them because they’re technically “educational” while getting the younger generation (now old and decrepit like me) into coding.

One final thought: Back in the day this was compelling content, because the reality of gaming in the 1980s as a young whippersnapper was that games were few and far between, and you cherished the limited quantity that you had.

It’s entirely a different scene now, with more free-to-play or offered-freely games than anyone could reasonably play, though those are mostly just entertainment products, not educational ones.

There are make-younger-coder efforts out there, whether it’s Apple’s Swift Playgrounds or established setups like Scratch… but nobody’s yet got around to making Return To The Mystery Of Silver Mountain.

Maybe that could be you.

I would do it myself, but I’ve just been killed by the ghost of the goblin guardian.