After many other hair-raising adventures, you finally wake from your dream to find "Mordon", the Ancient One, appearing before you shrouded in light. He seeks your help in desperation. His precious immortality machine has been destroyed by Bostafer, a younger Ancient One. Your quest is to retrieve all the lost components of the machine and bring them to him.
Your failure means the destruction of the universe. Success brings rewards unlimited.
At the start of the game, it is announced as the first in the Mordon saga. At least one sequel, Bostafer's Revenge, was promised, but never materialized.
On the other hand, although Mordon's Quest is sometimes seen as a sequel to the original Colossal Caves, this is a misconception - probably arising from the fact that John Jones-Steele also wrote a port of that game (as Classic Adventure, also for Melbourne House). Adding the tagline The Classic Adventure continues to the cover as a marketing stunt probably didn't make matters any clearer!
The game contains around 150 locations and gives the player six lives, which can be used in case of instant death.
The command WHERE is used to redescribe a location.
(Originally listed here also for the BBC Micro; no evidence seems to mention any BBC release)
[+] Users currently playing this game
Surely one of the longest adventure game I've played. It took me around 400 turns to finish it. Too bad its sequel was never released :(
Very old-school, but not too bad: long and atmospheric descriptions, good mix of tricky and easy puzzles, and a variety of environments with plenty of player agency to explore. A bit arbitrary to start with, as the first task is likely to be solved by chance; and maybe rushed towards the end, but can be entertaining.
I tried to "load bamboo" to make a gun and the game instead created a saved state which of course I should have thought of before parsing. When the game state had been saved the description was suffixed by a complete inventory of the game's portable objects which I managed to close down pretty quickly.
The reply to "Smoke Cigar" must be one of the funniest in text adventure history.
The first and the last puzzles are probably the hardest in this excellent large-scale puzzlefest. The latter in particular (in the Catacombs) requires the use of a verb that I have never utilised previously in a text adventure. The "king of the jungle" riddle is clever in its construction but somewhat of a non sequitur. A brace of puzzles also involve unclued hanging around; this is flagrant as the game will often chastise you for tarrying in most places.
Parser responses sometimes appear hard coded to rooms.