The Space Trap That Came With a Letter

Among the eighty five disc images a reader sent us this month is one labelled “Pre product Space trap”. It holds two files. One is Space Trap, Gem Software’s 1985 shooter, byte for byte the finished game the library already has. The other is a letter.

Dear Dave

DEARDAVE.TXT is from John Line of Gem Software, dated 29 March 1985, to Dave at Tatung. “Herewith, a very, very, pre-prod copy of Space-Trap for Einstein,” it begins. The controls are the same as in Time Trap, Gem’s earlier game, with the comma and full stop added for volume and the cursor keys for scrolling. There is a cheat mode, reached by holding Control, Shift and Graph with the G, E and M keys, “to be treated on a need to know basis”. Only four planets are finished; the final version “should have at least 8 (depends on how much memory we have left to play with)”. Mike Bayliss was going to find out some technical details about a Micro Einstein version. And a closing wish for “a long and hopefully mutually fruitful relationship” between Gem and Tatung, which the credits on every later Gem game suggest they had.

The game the letter came with was not on the disc. Someone had copied the finished release over it. But a file deleted from an Einstein disc is only forgotten by the directory; its sectors stay until something else needs them, and nothing had. Reading the disc sector by sector found a second SPACE TRAP of 23,040 bytes, nine kilobytes smaller than the release, with every one of its blocks still unclaimed. It came back whole.

Six Planets

The recovered build is the one the letter describes, a little further on. Its tables name six planets, Alpha Centauri, Betelgeuse, Arcturus, Polaris, Algol and Pollux, where the release has its full set and the Zed Zed’s Revenge ending. The “1985 Tatung (UK) Ltd. and Gem Software” credit is already on the title screen. Put on a system disc it loads, shows the title and asks for keyboard or joystick, as it would have on Dave’s desk in April 1985. The same file, it turns out, is also live on a Tatung evaluation disc in the same batch, beside Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy, which is presumably how it reached the evaluators.

The disc, the letter, the recovered build and a boot disc that runs it are in the library as Space Trap (Pre-Production Build), beside the finished game. Gem Software’s games and the letter remain Tatung (UK) and Gem’s; we would be glad to hear from anyone connected with either.