Vael I: The Grand Underground Empire

An open field, a boarded house, a trapdoor under the rug. Below lies a whole kingdom of treasure, trolls and a thief who wants what you carry. The classic underground adventure, renamed and running as it did in 1980.

Revived Revived from Part I of the 1980 underground trilogy (2025 source release) by Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels and Dave Lebling, MIT. Source: github.com/historicalsource (commit 97b7b3d68c07). Credits

Year: 1980
Era: Vector
Genre: Text adventure

Play Vael I: The Grand Underground Empire

Free, no sign-up. Keyboard, touch or gamepad.

Revived Credits

Revived from Part I of the 1980 underground trilogy (2025 source release) by Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels and Dave Lebling, MIT. Source: github.com/historicalsource (commit 97b7b3d68c07).

Original game by Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels and Dave Lebling (1980). Source code released in 2025 under the MIT License, Copyright (c) 2025 Microsoft. Names of the game and its world changed for this revival; interpreter written for Eracade.

This is not an Eracade original. It keeps its own licence, and the credit belongs to the people who made it. We adapted it to run on Eracade.

Original licence · Every revived game

How to play

Type commands and press Enter (OPEN DOOR, TAKE ALL, GO NORTH).
Esc pauses.

On touch

Tap the word chips to build a command, or type with the keyboard.
Map, Save and Restore sit at the top.

Every run starts on the title screen. Pause any time with P or the pause button; calm mode removes flashes and screen shake.

Workshop note

This is the original 1980 story file from the 2025 MIT source release, running on a Z-machine interpreter we wrote for Eracade. We changed the names of the game and its world, removed four crude words from the parser and left every room, puzzle and line of prose as the authors wrote them. Every typed line is recorded, and the dice come from the run seed, so a ranked run can be replayed and checked. Ranked runs last ten minutes and score the story's own points.

The Eracade workshop

Target scores

110
225
335
445
555
670
785
8100

Each target is a step up. Beat them all and you have outplayed the workshop.

The Vector era, 1977–1982

Glowing phosphor lines on black glass: wireframes, starfields and one bright dot doing something impossible.

More Vector cabinets

High scores

The top ten runs are saved in this browser with your three initials. Nothing is uploaded unless you submit a ranked run, so clearing site data clears the table.