Remembering “The Count” on the VIC-20: A Text Adventure Classic

Before games had graphics, they relied on something else—imagination.

One game that stayed with me was “The Count” on the VIC-20.

Do you remember playing games as a child, when everything felt larger than life and your imagination had no bounds? For me, one such game was "The Count" for the VIC-20, a text-based adventure game written by none other than Douglas Adams himself.

As an 11-year-old, I was immediately captivated by the game's premise of exploring a haunted castle, collecting treasures, and avoiding the notorious vampire Count Dracula. Even though the game had no graphics or sound, the story, and puzzles were engaging enough to keep me hooked for hours on end.

Now, years later, I still look back on "The Count" with fond memories of my childhood and the joy that video games brought me. 

Exploring the Castle

As a child playing "The Count" on the VIC-20, I remember being immediately drawn in by the game's text-based adventure format. The game took place in a haunted castle.

To this day I still have a mental map of the different rooms and the different artifacts you could collect.  I would sit with pen and paper making my own map and walk around the castle with commands "GO NORTH", "GO WEST" etc.  You could only enter two-word commands.  I remember in the kitchen there was Dumb-Waiter.  At the time I had no idea what a Dumb-waiter was.  There was no internet to google this at the time.  I assumed it was a waiter that could not speak.  By chance, after exhausting all options I said  "ENTER DUMB-WAITER" and all of a sudden the game had a whole new set of options.  You could "GO DOWN" and "GO UP".  down would take you to a workroom and down again would take you to the dungeon.

Without graphics, you had to build the world in your head. I would sit with pen and paper drawing maps and slowly working out how everything connected together.

Looking back, it probably shaped the way I still think about systems now.

Why It Stayed With Me

I have refreshed my memory on this as I found a VIC-20 emulator that runs on my Mac. After a hunt and a Google, I found and downloaded the software for "The Count". It took a while to figure out how to run the game.  But when I figured it out 1981 came flooding back.   I have been reliving my childhood again with this game.  I had forgotten that you have to complete the game within a number of commands.  If you use too many commands the sun goes down, you get tired and Dracula gets you and you wind up back in bed.

I've not got far enough but you find garlic to keep Dracula away, pills to stay awake, and matches to light a torch.  Oh and the Solar oven you can get into when the sun goes down.  Again I had no idea what a solar oven was.

Despite never completing the game, "The Count" has remained a nostalgic favorite of mine for years. As a child, it sparked my imagination and provided hours of entertainment, and as an adult, it's a reminder of simpler times when games were about exploration and discovery.

Looking back, what made games like this memorable wasn’t graphics or realism—it was exploration and imagination.

You had to experiment, map things out, and slowly build an understanding of how the world worked.

That way of thinking has stayed with me ever since.

Thinking about it now, I can see echoes of this style of exploration in Redcastle, a text-based adventure game I later created myself.

This also connects closely to my post on visual thinking and how I naturally build mental models of systems and spaces.

Understanding systems often starts with curiosity, exploration, and experimentation.

I spend a lot of time simplifying and understanding how systems fit together—whether technical or otherwise.

You can take a look at my TechFix service if that sounds useful.