Wings Over Sealand

The Spectrum community is arguably more on top of the machine’s history than any other in the world of gaming, so it’s always quite noteworthy when something and/or someone escapes its notice entirely. And so it is with Lukasz Kur.

The screenshot above is of a game called a_e Adventure, or sometimes a_e in King Chrum’s Gold Mines. (According to Kur the character’s name represents “a portion of a forum member’s user name which inadvertantly looked like an emoticon of sorts – a little face with asymetrical eyes.”)

A fun, inventive 12-screen platformer with puzzle elements, it came out in 2014 and was apparently a spiritual successor to a Polish-language text adventure for the C64 and Nintendo DS from a few years earlier by the same author.

That’s already quite weird, but we’re just getting started.

In 2016 Kur ported the game to the NES, initially as a_e Adventure 2, but it was soon renamed The Cowlitz Gamers’ Adventure in honour of the Facebook group and website that released it on cartridge.

The game’s protagonist was called Justice, which we mention for local colour.

In 2017 it acquired a much-prettified update, The Cowlitz Gamers’ Adventure 2, with graphics by an artist called M-Tee. (The download for TCGA2 also includes TCGA1.)

And in 2020 a “standalone mini-sequel” called The Cowlitz Gamers’ Lost Adventure was released, although it’s unclear if it involved any new coding or was just a new level set. In 2022 the NES trilogy was released as a downloadable title for the Evercade VS retro console.

In between the first two NES games, Lukasz Kur had popped up in a number of UK newspapers and videogames sites due to his involvement alongside veteran Speccy coders The Oliver Twins with the release of Wonderland Dizzy.

He was also programmer for the Twins’ 2016 NES release from the Dizzy universe, Dreamworld Pogie, and the subsequent Kickstarter-funded restoration of Panic Dizzy for the same machine, and in 2018-19 produced a couple of guinea-pig-themed NES puzzle platformers, Gruniozerca 2 and Gruniozerca 3.

In early January 2018 a number of retrogaming sites had announced Kur’s supposedly imminent release of a mod called Fantastic Dizzy Superior.

But as far as we can tell it’s never appeared. And as we Googled around for more information, we thought we might have found the reason.

Despite intensive searching, WoSland has been unable to track down any subsequent reference to the case in the five years since the two men were arrested and charged. Were they convicted? Acquitted? Did the CPS throw the case out? Did they get community service? Are they still on bail awaiting due process in the UK’s hopelessly clogged judicial system, possibly turning out homebrew NES games in the meantime as penance/restitution for their crimes? Did the creator of Justice receive some justice?

Frankly we just don’t know. The most likely explanation is that it’s two entirely different people with the same name, but there appears to be no way of telling – it doesn’t seem to be a very common moniker in Poland – and even gun-smugglers have hobbies. There seems to be pretty much zip in the way of info about the coder that we can compare to what we know about the possible crims, which is kind of odd in itself.

What we DO know is that there’s absolutely no mention of either Lukasz Kur or a_e Adventure in the ZX Database, and that’s quite odd for someone with such a strong connection to the world of the Spectrum.

Anyway, to while away the time I’ve translated the game into English.

It’s unusual, fast and very playable. You have to collect the gold on every level while avoiding baddies and hazards. You can jump up through pink or blue platforms but only drop down through blue ones, and many levels include a bonus-points diamond in an inaccessible location which can usually only be retrieved by triggering an invisible switch somewhere in the level to open up a route to it.

When you lose all your lives your score resets to 0 but you restart on the last level you reached, so getting the maximum possible score (all gold and diamonds in a single run) is very tricky, but you can whip through all 12 levels in barely five minutes so there’s always time for another go.

Download the English version here (Polish original also included), and if you happen to know anything about the identities and fate of the Dover Docks Duo, do let us know.