Well, it's been a long time since I actually had and played this game on my original VIC-20, back in 1982, so it is hard to recall. This game was the most addictive game I ever played on any computer system I have owned.
The Tomb of Drewan came on a cassette, and was Released by AUDIOGENIC LTD. PO BOX 88, READING, BERKS, ENGLAND in 1982. I have actually been in contact with this company (they still make software nowadays) by the end of 2001. I sent them an e-mail asking for information on the Tomb of Drewan. They answered real quickly, in a nice tone but with a message that made me think they will never contact me again.
The original author, Trevor Pitts, however, has sent me this nice scan of the original box, along with a nice story about the conception of this game. The name 'Drewan' was an acronym of his son's name Andrew. There have been quite some problems keeping all the code within the VIC-20's 16KB limits and to make the graphics as nice as possible.
The original tape consisted of 2 parts; a loader and the actual game code. It requires a VIC-20 with a 8K or 16K memory expansion. The game was written in BASIC, and if you look into the code you can see it was programmed very intelligently.
Trevor Pitts was the original author of this game. In the summer and autumn of 2003 I have had quite a nice e-mail contact with him, which resulted in scans of the original box (see the top of this page) and the original manual (see the 'Adventurer's guide' paragraph on this page).
I have set up a page for the brave creatures who dare to enter the Tomb of Drewan. It will help you to survive your long and hard stay in this dark and humid building.....Be warned: the Tomb is a lonely place and staying alive will be a hard task...If you wish to try, click here for the Adventurer's guide, written by myself: someone who has been there.....and will be tortured by nightmares for the rest of his life.
The original version of the Tomb of Drewan had keyboard controls that were very neatly arranged for the VIC keyboard. However, on a PC the controls can be very confusing. For those who use the PCVIC emulator I have created a version that plays well with a PC keyboard. This is a PCV file for automatic loading into the PCVIC VIC-20 emulator. The only modifications I made are in the steering controls. Saving the game can be done by saving the entire machine state to a new PCV file. You can get the file here.
For the real hackers out there on the Internet I have created a page to explain the inner workings of the original BASIC code as adequate as possible. This document is not finished yet, and I doubt it ever will, but you can take a look here.
Some time ago (in the winter of 1998) I created some sort of alpha-version of the Tomb of Drewan for OS/2, which was an exact clone (in terms of rooms, characters, etc.) of the original, because I hacked the original BASIC code. Drewan/2 was written entirely in C++, running on OS/2 Warp 3 and Warp 4. Unfortunately, due to lack of time to do any serious programming it never reached a public beta stadium, let alone a real public release. Besides, my 24/7 machine is now a Windows-based machine, and OS/2 is not powering my production machine anymore.
Some people have asked me to fabricate a Java version of the Tomb of Drewan, and I must say that the idea strikes me, as people all over the world and on all platforms would be able to play the game. We might even enhance the original, although I still have no idea how this would turn out. I do have the proper Java developer tools, but not the skills. I think. Time, time, time, people!
Maybe someone wishes to volunteer?
Anyway, Don Brodale pointed me to an MS-DOS version of the Tomb of Drewan, written by Paul Robson. This version, complete with source(!), even mentions this website in the README file :-). The MS-DOS version of the Tomb of Drewan can be found at Paul Robsons's 'the Valley' website.
I have had quite a few reactions from people who would like to see more info on the game play of the Tomb of Drewan, some people wanted game play tips and the meaning of the keys. Most of these questions are handled by the information on these pages, I hope. If not, drop me a line.
I have had quite some reactions on this little project, so I'm determined to keep up the Drewan pages as long as possible. For the foreseeable future this won't be any problem as I have enough web-space left at my ISP. Don't worry and keep them E-mails coming!