After setting the co-ordinates for the other side of the room, you stepped in front of the beam of white light and disappeared.

A few seconds later you materialized, expecting to see the grey walls of your lab, but instead you found yourself in a dense jungle on the small planet of Iloofrax...

Stranded on Iloofrax, by Matthew O'Donnell, was first released for the 32k Acorn Electron in 1987. It was one of four games by different authors released on a single cassette by Potter Programs, a company based in a cul-de-sac in Surrey. Written with Gilsoft's The Quill, it was a veritable grab-bag of wacky ideas. I loved it. After releasing Goldilocks is a FOX! in 2003 I was looking for a new IF project, and decided it might be fun to port Iloofrax to ADRIFT.

However it soon became apparent that a straight port of the game was not going to stand up against modern IF. Though there was a lot of very good, and very funny writing in the game, the room descriptions were very short, and a lot of the puzzles were rather unfair. In addition the endgame was rather flat and colourless after what came before. I had to decide whether to abandon the project or to update the game. In the end I decided on an update, which retains almost all of Matthew's original text, and significantly expands upon it.

Then there was the problem of the endgame. Not long after Iloofrax was released I wrote my own game for the Electron, a comic space epic called Once on a Blue Moon that I never completed. It had a very similar feel to Iloofrax having been inspired by it. When I fired up my old Electron, which had been sitting in my parents' attic for fifteen years, I was very pleased to find that not only did the old girl still work, but so did all the tapes containing my unfinished games. Some of it was rather good, so I took the decision to salvage the best parts of Once on a Blue Moon and incorporate them into the new version of Stranded on Iloofrax, making the game's map about half as big again and adding some quite fiendish puzzles.

Stranded on Iloofrax will probably be my last ADRIFT game, since I now find the restrictions of the system rather limiting. It will hopefully be a fun little romp, appealing to those who like not-too-serious games!