Jacaranda Jim

Jacaranda Jim is a text adventure computer game written by British programmer Graham Cluley. The game was originally written in 1987 by Cluley while he was studying at Guildford College of Technology, England. At this stage the game only ran on a PRIME minicomputer and was named "Derek the Troll" in honour of its central character (based upon one of Cluley's lecturers).
In a 1992 interview with SynTax magazine, Cluley described how college authorities questioned the lampooning of one of its staff, forcing Cluley to rename the character "Alan the Gribbley" and the game itself to be rechristened "Jacaranda Jim".
The game, which was written in Pascal, was then ported to the PC platform and further developed. This PC version was distributed as shareware and appeared on a number of British computer magazine cover disks, including PC Plus magazine. Users who "registered" the shareware version of their software, were sent a paper map of the game and allowed to write to Cluley requesting hints to solve the game's puzzles.
A sequel to "Jacaranda Jim" called "The Case of Spindle's Crotchet" was planned and partially completed, but never released<ref name=":0" />. Cluley went on to write another text adventure game called Humbug.
Jacaranda Jim has now been placed in the public domain and is available, with the hints and map, as a free download from Cluley's website. Some years later an unauthorised conversion of Jacaranda Jim, written using the ADRIFT adventure game-writing tool, was released by Campbell Wild.

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