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September 19, 2024 36 mins

Expert gamers are invited to an all-expenses paid trip to California for the first round of Atari’s SwordQuest contest and a chance at the first treasure: a $25,000 medallion. The problem? Solving the game’s central puzzle will prove nearly impossible.  

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Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
It's the nineteen eighties, and parents in news media are
seeing the devil in everything. Ritual animal killings, subliminal messages
and heavy metal songs, demonic imagery in the Smurfs, which
some religious fundamentalists have dubbed undead creatures because they were
blue and some were corpses. Some even believe Pamper's diapers

(00:23):
are the work of the devil. Because the Procter and
Gamble logo has an astrological design. It's a kind of
mass hyst area that comes to be known as Satanic panic.
Most of it, virtually all of it, is total nonsense.
But in May nineteen eighty three, in the bowels of
a building in California, a group of people really are

(00:45):
gathered around a giant Zodiac sign on the floor. If
you're one of the people concerned about Satan taking over
the world, this is one very weird scene. In the
middle of it as a thirty year old named Jackie Custer.
She's a new mom and a room full of strangers
where there will be a kind of ritual involved, a
ritual she's been participating in over and over again for months.

Speaker 2 (01:10):
Well, I'm a night owl, and I know that I
would put my son down to bed before eight o'clock.
You know, he was usually asleep, and as a toddler,
he kept pushing that bedtime up. But I would start
and many times Dana would come home from work really
really late, and I'd still be sitting there doing it,
and he'd say, what are you doing. You know, you
got to get up with the baby. And I would
get into it, and I'd sort of lose track of

(01:31):
time and where I was and just kept going on it.
I would say, hm, oh, it had to have been
close to one hundred hours or more.

Speaker 1 (01:41):
This ritual consumed Jackie's free time. But Jackie didn't have
to pledge her soul to the devil, nor is she
here in California to sacrifice her baby. All she has
to do is be better and faster than the six
other people in the room. Six others, all of whom
have practiced the same thing for most of the past year.

(02:02):
One is a member of the Coast Guard, another a
sixteen year old kid. They're all gathered at the headquarters
of Atari, the world's leading manufacturer of video games, and
while they didn't realize that at the time, they were
about to make video gaming history, for the first time
a home video game could pay off with a real,

(02:24):
tangible reward, a prize that held enough value to pay
for college, or a new car, or a lot of
demonic pampers diapers. One of these people is going to
leave with a gold talisman worth twenty five thousand dollars,
but they won't be able to hang on to it
for long. For iHeartRadio, this is the Legend of sword Quest.

(02:48):
I'm your host, Jamie Loftus, and this is episode two. Gentlemen,
start your joysticks. In nineteen eighty two, a Atari launched
sword Quest, a contest that featured four games, four prizes,
and a chance for the winners to meet up again
to vie for the Sword of Ultimate Sorcery, a jewel

(03:11):
studied blade valued at fifty thousand dollars. Here's how the
first game Earth World worked. Your character explored twelve different
rooms that contained sixteen different objects. You had the option
of bringing the objects to different rooms. If you did
and it was a fit, you got a number that
corresponded to a page and panel in the included DC

(03:34):
comic book. The comic was hiding word clues. Put five
clues together and in the right sequence, and you cracked
the game. But there was one problem. None of this
was explained to players.

Speaker 3 (03:48):
There was no clues or hints anywhere in an instruction
manual or anywhere to explain what items go where. It
was literally trial and error, as I required one object
in one room, or two in this one, three in
this one, and I think you had like sixteen objects
or something like that.

Speaker 1 (04:06):
That's Bert Wardahl. We met him in episode one. At
the time, he was thirteen years old and eager to
have a gold talisman worth twenty five thousand dollars on
his nightstand. But Atari wasn't making it easy. In fact,
the game was so hard it drove people to the brink.

Speaker 3 (04:25):
The amount of combinations you could use are probably in
the millions or billions, and I just remember being very
frustrated by it because I didn't know what to do.
I did find one of the clues haphazardly, I don't
know what I did to generate it.

Speaker 1 (04:40):
It was like being told to win at chess, but
not telling you how each piece moved. The best advice
Atari gave in the Owner's Manual was to keep a
pen and paper handy because you'd be doing a lot
of exploration. When it came to trying to solve the
puzzles Bert played, he played a lot. He wandered in
and out of rooms on this controlling a character that

(05:02):
was little more than a pair of legs and a torso.
This was the first Golden Age of gaming, but not
the Golden age of graphics. This was Theater of the
Mind stuff, an adventure that unfolded in your head and
was fueled by the packaging art which made it look
like a grand fantasy epic, and the included comic book,
which dramatized the whole affair. Twins Tour and Tara are

(05:25):
on a mission of revenge against King Tyrannus, who killed
their parents. To defeat him, they'll have to conquer a
series of quests. At least that's what a wise spirit
tells them in the DC comics, written by Jerry Conway
and Roy Thomas and illustrated by the late George Perez.

Speaker 4 (05:44):
To achieve your goal, you must be willing to learn
what each world can teach you. You must have open minds
and yes, open hearts as well. You must put aside
your anger and your hate. You must learn to think
before acting. You must learn to judge before responding Descend
and you will enter the first of the four worlds.

(06:06):
You must conquer Earth World.

Speaker 1 (06:09):
But Bert was, after all, thirteen years old. He wasn't
about to conquer anything, and he was getting slightly angry
at the game, which didn't have all the typical villains,
the aliens, the monsters. He was essentially playing against himself,
wandering around chambers with a zodiac theme.

Speaker 3 (06:28):
Honestly, you know, the first week that I had that game,
I probably played it every day, tried to figure it out,
and nothing ever worked. I got to the point where
I couldn't find anything more in the game. There was
no hints or anything to help you. There was no
Internet you could look on for help. There was no
Atari eight hundred number you could call for help. It
was just you trying to figure this out. And I

(06:51):
remember trying to look through the comic book on my own.

Speaker 1 (06:56):
Bert wasn't the only one having trouble in Ourlita calif
Jackie Custer was equally befuddled by the chambers and their clues,
but she didn't fit the typical profile of a gamer,
at least not at the time. Jackie was an adult
married to Dana Custer and had a lot going on
in her life. Back surgery for some ruptured discs had

(07:18):
put her out of commission, but she still had to
tend to their new baby. Earthworld was a welcome distraction
of sorts. Even though she had initially bought the Atari
system for her husband, she wound up playing it a lot,
and she loved the idea of sword Quest almost as
much as Bert hated it.

Speaker 2 (07:38):
I kind of think I just ran into it, kind
of as an accident. We didn't subscribe to the Atari
magazine at the time, so I'm not sure how I
found out about it, but got the game and brought
it home and was fascinated by the fact that it
was an action adventure, that there was actually something to

(07:58):
figure out, and there's no instructions with the game whatsoever.
You know, you took it out of the box and
there was the comic book and the cassette and no
directions on you know, you go this way or that way,
or do this, do that, nothing, So you really had
to start from the very beginning to try to figure
it out yourself.

Speaker 1 (08:19):
It was also kind of a bonding experience with Dana.
Jackie was good at solving puzzles, but not so good
using the joystick.

Speaker 2 (08:27):
We worked as a team when he was home. He
was really good with joysticks and I was not. You know,
it was all thumbs and I had a really hard
time getting through the little games within the game. He
would take and control it for me and get me
into the rooms and I would keep copious notes and

(08:47):
write everything down and try to follow along and find
the clues, and together as a team, we worked on
this oh night after night. It was like instead of
watching TV, we just get out the game and start
working on it.

Speaker 1 (09:01):
Sometimes this went on all day and into the night,
Dana coming home from work and seeing Jackie still at it,
still hoping to vanquish King Tyrannus. Finally Jackie realized what
the game was doing.

Speaker 2 (09:14):
Every once in a while, the screen would go into
these bright colors, and these clues would show up two numbers,
and the comic book had beautiful pictures. But after I
looked at it a few times, I noticed that there
was words hidden in the pictures, and so I figured
that it had to do with trying to figure out
what the answer was. So I just started writing down
those numbers, and eventually I figured out that it must

(09:38):
stand for where it's at in the book. And so
I've found that a gourd hidden on one of the pages.
And then by looking at that page number, I noticed
that one of the clues was that number. So it
just hit me that that's the page number. And then
the second number was the panel the panel on the
comic book.

Speaker 1 (09:59):
This went on for months. Finally Jackie looked down at
a piece of paper. There were ten word clues total,
but only five of them were correct. To know which five,
you had to have noticed that a poem appeared on
the first page of the.

Speaker 5 (10:13):
Comic Conquesting with Old Siblings, Twain Prime Thieves of Ravaged Earth,
Next journey to the fire World, Land of Volcanoes, Birth
Waves without number, Water's realm, but where if Evil's there?
Last read the Heir's winds Heaven High to claim a
prize most rare.

Speaker 1 (10:35):
Okay, so it wasn't keats, but it was important. The
poem was printed in all brown ink except for two words,
which were in purple. Those words were prime and number.
Only the clues on prime number pages and panels were accurate.
The five words were talisman, tower quest found and in

(11:02):
tower found in Quest Talisman. No, that didn't seem right.

Speaker 2 (11:06):
It was just process of elimination, hours and hours and
hours of doing this and keeping notes, and then eventually
I got to the point where I had all the clues,
had all these panels laid out, and put the words together,
and it came out to say, Creston Tower Talsman found.

Speaker 1 (11:23):
After hundreds of hours of playing, Jackie sent in her
submission form that had been included in the game. She
managed to finish it ahead of the contest deadline March fifteenth,
nineteen eighty three. Back in Wisconsin, Bert wasn't having as
much luck. The clues were too elusive.

Speaker 3 (11:40):
You know, I'm a smart guy. I spent probably more
time than anybody, at least around my area, and I
was trying to use logic to figure these things out.
I was scouring that comic book and I just couldn't
do it. There was nothing that helped. It was very
frustrating to me because usually if I put my mind
to something, I can figure it out, but this one
eluded me. I got tired of it.

Speaker 1 (12:03):
So Bert finally set Earth World aside. He wouldn't be
going to Sunnyvale. The vast majority of players who didn't
have the time or patience wouldn't be going either. Those
that found an answer had no idea whether it was
the right answer. The game didn't tell them. They had
to learn the old fashioned way from the mail carrier.
In the spring of nineteen eighty three, Jackie got a letter.

(12:26):
When she opened it, she saw it was on Atari letterhead.

Speaker 2 (12:30):
When I got the paper, I remember the day that
the letter arrived in the mail. I remember opening it,
and when I've read the words that congratulations, you've been
you know selected, I've lost it. It was unbelievable. When
I told Dana, he couldn't believe it either. It was
really a fun part of my life, a time when
things were real simple and I had the time to

(12:51):
do something like this.

Speaker 1 (12:53):
The phrase had been correct quest in Tower Talisman found
was the answer Atari was looking for, although Jackie didn't
know it just then. She was one of only eight
people who submitted the correct answer. This was exciting, but
Jackie had a couple of problems. For one, she had
a baby. The baby itself was not the issue, but

(13:14):
it's not so easy to just leave an infant to
go attend a video game tournament. The second problem was
that Jackie and Dana were a team. Dana was the muscle,
sort of the joystick operator. Jackie was the brains of
the operation. But she still felt like she and her
husband were a pair like Frodo and Samwise or Bo

(13:35):
and Luke Duke.

Speaker 2 (13:37):
And so when it came to filling out the application,
I just sort of thought it was kind of like
that we would be able to go up to Atari together.
What I sort of thought is that we were a team.
And I think I even filled out my name first
and then put his next to it in parentheses or something,
and wrote on there that we were a husband and wife.

(13:58):
But when it came back the letter from Atari saying
that I had been selected, I talked to them on
the phone and they said that because my name was
on there first, legally I had to be the one
that came up and played the game.

Speaker 1 (14:13):
In a sports movie, this is the kind of moment
where the hero in this case, heroin sprain's an ankle
or gets a bad referee call. They're down ten points,
but Jackie was undeterred.

Speaker 2 (14:25):
I go, my husband wants to be there while I'm
playing the game and won't know what to do with
the baby. So They said, well, do you have someone
that can care for the baby while you're doing the contest?
And I go, yeah, I'm my mom. So they paid
for my husband, my mom, myself, and my son to
I'll go.

Speaker 1 (14:44):
Although Jackie's husband could come, he wasn't allowed to play
with her. The tournament was single player only. Jackie had
been playing the video game equivalent of doubles tennis. Now
she was being told her partner couldn't step foot on
the court. This was like limping into a championship game
with a broken ankle. Even worse, her competition would be

(15:04):
the best of the best. It was time to find
out who would be crowned the first Champion of sword Quest,
but not everyone would show up. Jackie, her husband, and
their baby arrived in Sunnyville on May one, nineteen eighty three,

(15:25):
the day before the tournament was scheduled. They drove directly
to the hotel, which was fully paid for by Atari.
There she got a chance to check out her competition
for the very first time. One contestant was a lieutenant
with the US Coast Guard. Two were freshmen from the
University of New Orleans. One was just sixteen years old
and had to be accompanied by his parents.

Speaker 6 (15:46):
Supposedly, there was only eight people at submitted all the
right answers, and there were one of their stipulations what
they were going to take up to fifty people, and
for the first game, they only had eight submit the
right answers. So off we all went, except for one
person missed their flight. I don't know who was, and
I kept thinking, you can get a chance for twenty.

Speaker 7 (16:08):
Five thousand dollars prize. I might have booked another flight.

Speaker 1 (16:11):
That's Stephen Bell. He was twenty years old and from
Saint Clair Shores, a suburb of Detroit. At the time,
he looked a bit like a roadie, long hair mustache.
Stephen was one of the seven, and believe it or not,
this is the first time he's talked publicly about sword
Quest since the eighties.

Speaker 7 (16:29):
Yep, penty good first ever podcast I'm all school.

Speaker 1 (16:35):
Stephen had gotten the answer right, but it happened by accident.
He didn't notice the clue hidden in the poem for.

Speaker 6 (16:41):
The first one, and at that time that I sent
my answers in and I really didn't even know it
was a phrase because I just wrote them down in
the order I found him. The first game I think
five words were quest n tower, talisman found. A couple
of weeks later, I got a letter from him, and
my father at the time was like, no way, Like

(17:04):
here you go.

Speaker 7 (17:05):
I wanted trip to California.

Speaker 1 (17:07):
Jackie, meanwhile, was the only woman who had gotten the
answer correct and in nineteen eighty three, this made her
of great interest to everyone.

Speaker 2 (17:17):
Atari immediately said, well, we're really excited that you're the
only female and all the stuff. At the time, it
was a big thing, you know. I know, a couple
of the guys that were there, the teenagers mostly were saying,
like interested whether or not I could figure it out,
or whether I knew what I was doing, and like
I said, I was not good with joysticks.

Speaker 1 (17:38):
After meeting the competition, the contestants settled in for the night.
The next day they congregated at Atari's headquarters. Jackie looked around.
In the tournament room was a large zodiac sign and
seven television sets on rolling carts like the kind you
used to see in school. Each set had two folding chairs,

(18:00):
one for the player, one for a judge. Then Jackie
saw the prize that was up for grabs.

Speaker 2 (18:07):
The talisman. It was very pretty. It wasn't exactly completely round.
It had kind of like scaloped edge to it, if
I remember right. So it was twelve pieces of the pie,
and at the head of each one they had the
zodiac symbol, all done in stones, rare stones, and I
think they used them birth stones, Aukland marines and topaths

(18:28):
and garnets and that sort of thing, and then diamonds
and rubies and pearls. But it was very beautiful, and
I think it had a combination of white and yellow gold.
I don't think it was all one or the other.

Speaker 1 (18:43):
The talisman was eighteen carrots, solid gold, finished with diamonds
and other precious stones. Atari wisely kept a security guard nearby.
He was with Pinkerton, the private security and detective agency
that had been around since the eighteen hundreds. To Jackie
and the rest of the players, everything seemed pretty well organized.

(19:04):
They had flown in on time, had hotel accommodations, and
the zodiac sign was a nice touch. But behind the
scenes Atari was working on the fly Earth World was
not really a game with a beginning, middle, and end.
It was a game of strategy and curiosity, and it
didn't seem to dawn on anyone in marketing that holding

(19:25):
a tournament with that kind of game was going to
be difficult. With just days Togo before the contest, an
Atari employee started writing up rules. Earth World would have
to be a timed competition. The first person to reach
the eleventh level of the game by finding and placing
objects in the correct place would be declared the winner.

(19:46):
There would be a ninety minute time limit because Atari
had planned a catered lunch and needed to wrap the
contest up by noon. To help speed things along, a
special version of the game had to be prepared by
Dan Higgins, who wrote the original program, and John Michael Battaglia,
who came up with fresh clues. It was different enough
from the commercial release so that players wouldn't just be

(20:08):
able to mimic their own movements. They'd have to figure
things out in the moment, kind of like Atari's marketing team.
Finally everyone was ready. Jackie took her seat and a
judge sat beside her. The televisions began to be fired up.
Each TV had its own Atari console with Earthworld plugged in.

(20:29):
Those two were turned on. The rules were explained. Reached
the eleventh level, when the talisman a lot of Sleepless
Nights had come to this. It was time with seven
judges watching seven players. An Atari employee gave the signal,
and yes, he really said this.

Speaker 3 (20:49):
Lady, gentlemen, start your joy say.

Speaker 1 (20:56):
Like a race. All seven players hit start and began
playing across the screens. Tiny characters began darting in and
out of chambers. Each room had four possible exits. You'd
have to try them to see where they led.

Speaker 2 (21:12):
I sort of felt kind of funny while I was
playing the game. I was very nervous too, so it
made it even worse. And when I couldn't get through
to a room or whatever, I sort of turn around
and look at him and kind of give him a
look like, well, you know, I'm doing the best I can.
It was just fun. I knew the answers, I could
figure out the puzzle.

Speaker 1 (21:32):
Because the screens were facing away from each other, it
wasn't easy to make out how the other players were doing,
but when a level was completed, a noise could be heard.
Pretty soon, the room began to fill up with the
chimes one after another. But Jackie realized that she and
Dana were really a team. Losing her partner was having

(21:52):
a dramatic effect on her gameplay.

Speaker 2 (21:55):
It's too bad I wasn't better with joysticks because when
we were playing the playoff game, the one for the prize,
I had a horrible time getting through the different rooms.
And it would have been so much better if Ganna
could have been there with me, playing the game with me,
but it didn't work out that way.

Speaker 1 (22:15):
Near Jackie, with Stephen Bell and another player, Matt Belasa,
a twenty one year old chemistry major from Michigan, they
began to pull away from the pack. Playing neck and neck.
Stephen and Matt were in a two person race, but Matt,
like most of the players, began having trouble with the
fourth level. That left Stephen and another player, Stephen Dousa,

(22:37):
to pull ahead. One would complete a level, then the
other would catch up.

Speaker 6 (22:42):
Well, it was kind of funny because I'm sitting there
reading these clues and all sudden they hear some of
the other contestants tevs and making a little NOOYI like
they had already got the first one.

Speaker 7 (22:50):
I'm like five minuter start going, so here we go.

Speaker 6 (22:53):
And then every time somebody would solve another level, you
would hear it, and by the like the fifth or
sixth one on me and Steve and Duster were pulled
on the way, and every time we got when we
could feel it one else's I is honest, like you
son of it.

Speaker 1 (23:11):
Twenty minutes, in thirty minutes and then thirty five Stephen
Bell got the lead. But then Stephen Dusa caught up
to him.

Speaker 6 (23:19):
You get heard the noises, but he didn't know exactly
where it was coming from. So so I don't know
how how far exactly somebody else says, But you know,
then when they got on the last one that I
get the next one, I'm in And that's when I
finally got like a little bit nervous, like man, I
could actually winness thing.

Speaker 1 (23:37):
At exactly forty six minutes and forty nine point four seconds,
one of the judges stood up and gave a signal
there was a winner, and it was Stephen Bell who
felt a tap on his shoulder.

Speaker 7 (23:51):
The judges were amazed on that.

Speaker 6 (23:53):
You know, we solved all their riddles and can figure
it out in under an hour. In the contest, the game,
you had to get to the eleventh level the way.
After I got done with ten, I'm like, I only
got one to go and then sure enough I did
the right thing and screen popped up with eleven and
the music, and the guy behind me said, ladies and gentlemen,
we have a winner.

Speaker 7 (24:13):
And I'm like, he's obviously he's talking about to meet.
That was pretty cool.

Speaker 1 (24:15):
Out of a half million people, he was the only
one to complete the quest. The talisman was his, but
it wouldn't be his for very long. At the time
he won Earth World, Stephen was twenty, out of work
and a little cash strapped. The win couldn't have come

(24:36):
at a better time. When he started playing the game,
he couldn't find a job. The game became his job.

Speaker 6 (24:44):
From nineteen eighty to mid eighty two, there was nothing.
You couldn't go to McDonald's and get a job, so
I was doing a lot of nothing, probably all Shortly
after I got the game, I actually got my first job.
And these games they gave you nine months to solve it.
In that time, yeah, I ended up getting a job finally.

Speaker 1 (25:05):
He had been playing Atari for a few years. Earth
World was being promoted through the Atari fan club, where
Stephen first caught mention of it. A twenty five thousand
dollars prize to play a game he was playing for
free already.

Speaker 6 (25:19):
Her parents just one day asked us if we want
to go buy other thing? Sure or me and my
few sisters. So we brought the thing home and we
go from there. Started with Pong and Space Invaders. One
of the games had a information about a little Atari
Club magazine, so I joined that and so then this
way I get information on all the newest games coming out,

(25:42):
and that's how I found out about the Sword Press
games coming out.

Speaker 1 (25:45):
At first, he had found Earthworld as perplexing as everyone else.
The game didn't seem to adhere to any of the
normal rules. He wandered from chamber to chamber, but eventually
realized that searching for clues on screen was more work
than the contest required.

Speaker 6 (26:00):
All the contest was really in the comic book. The
gameplay it was supposed to be kind of coinciding with
the book, where you would play the game and get
a clue, and then go back to the comic book
and find your clue. Well, it didn't take me too
long to find out that the whole contest was basically
reading the comic book and finding the clues. So he

(26:22):
just played the game because it was kind of fun,
but to actually go through the entire game was impossible.
Solving that first game it was almost like a lot
of reads. There was no way they even admitted that
kind of ran shorter time and had to get it out,
Get it out, get it out.

Speaker 1 (26:38):
Steven scanned the panels searching for hidden words. Some were
written on walls, some backwards, some in speech bubbles. Sometimes
he grabbed a dictionary to discover their meaning. I mean,
what is a talisman anyway? But he got all five
of them and in the right order quest in talisman
tower found like Jackie, He sent in his submission form

(27:01):
and waited. Then Stephen flew out, met everyone eight and
experienced his first earthquake.

Speaker 6 (27:08):
I decided, I'm going to wash my hair ealthquake, Neil,
Now stick your head under the faucet, because you know
you're all limber when you're twenty years old.

Speaker 7 (27:14):
And I remember when I went to do that, I
almost fell into the tub. I'm like, what the heck's
going on?

Speaker 6 (27:20):
So I washed my hair going down the middle lobbry and
one of the other contestants was a woman from la
and she says, did you feel at earthquake?

Speaker 7 (27:28):
Is that what that was? Thing? Got I I thought
I was losing it.

Speaker 1 (27:33):
The earthquake was minor and the contest was uninterrupted. When
Stephen won, an Atari employee walked over and, with camera
bulbs flashing, handed him the talisman. Then everyone was invited
out to a celebratory luncheon, well not exactly out. After
the contest, Atari employees cleared the televisions and game systems

(27:55):
and dragged in a bunch of folding tables. Like the
Knights of the Round Table, Harry, players ate and swapped
stories and strategies.

Speaker 6 (28:05):
Jackie had come up to me and she said, you know,
when I seen you walk into the lobby yesterday, I
told myself that's the winner with you know, she didn't
tell me that at the time. I'm like, you had
such confidence in me. I had no idea what I had,
no idea what we're even doing.

Speaker 1 (28:21):
They all flew out the next day, but for Steven,
the trip home was a little more complicated. He had
come to Sunnyvale with a few changes of clothing. He
was coming home with a medallion worth twenty five thousand
dollars and one small enough to steal or worse lose somewhere.

Speaker 7 (28:40):
That was the other interesting thing.

Speaker 6 (28:41):
When I won, they handed it to me and said
here your congratulations, and I took it home on the plane.
And after I had won, one of the little writers
for their little magazine interviewed me. He asked me, you know,
are you going to be worried that you're having this thing?
I said, no, nobody's going to know what the hell
it is, and I ain't gonna tell them. Everyone's home
and I walk in and I just put it on

(29:03):
a kitchen table and went May cameer. I opened it
up and say what do you think? And I'm like,
what's that? My sister actually said it was that a replica?
I said, no, I want it. I won't and then
of course they were, oh my god, he want you,
and I could believe it.

Speaker 7 (29:14):
He had took some mom. You know, she starts crying.

Speaker 6 (29:17):
You know, there wasn't too much work at the time,
and I just got this, you know, three dollars and
thirty five cent an hour minimum wage job, and next thing,
you know, I got picking twenty five thousand dollars prize.

Speaker 7 (29:27):
So that was pretty cool.

Speaker 1 (29:29):
This was incredibly cool. Months of gaming had earned him
a tangible prize worth real cash. But Stephen earned something
else too. Stephen had bested Earthworld that earned him an
automatic spot in the finals. He now had a one
in four chance of winning the Sword of Ultimate Sorcery.

(29:50):
For now, the talisman went directly to a safe deposit box.
Stephen was taking no chances. His mother, who was an
insurance agent, also wanted to get it appraised for insurance purposes.

Speaker 6 (30:02):
When I got it appraised, there is a jewelry store
in the area, and we told him what it was,
and my mom wanted to have it appraised for the
insurance purposes. And you know, this thing was, you know,
six inches diameter and three quarters thick. And we handed.

Speaker 7 (30:20):
The guy and he says, well, what's this made out of?

Speaker 8 (30:22):
Him?

Speaker 6 (30:22):
He said, that's solid gold, And he says, no, it's not.
He says, this, it doesn't look right if I got
a brass base. And my brain immediately went to I
hope so, because it'd be a hell of a lawsuit.
So my dad and I are standing there and and
the guys, I'll take it in the back, and I
guess what they do is they do this a little
chemical test on it.

Speaker 7 (30:41):
It was so funny because we're standing there.

Speaker 6 (30:42):
In just about a minute or so later, some girl
come out from the back room and her eyes looked like,
you know, giant saucers, like, oh my god, what.

Speaker 7 (30:52):
Do we get here?

Speaker 6 (30:53):
And then that guy comes back says, I'll be damned,
this is solid gold.

Speaker 1 (30:57):
Steven kept the talisman for a few months. Sometimes he'd
take it out of the safety deposit box when a
kid from the neighborhood wanted to see it. But keeping
it indefinitely carried with it a complication. Remember when Oprah
Winfrey gave every member of her audience a new car.
It was a big deal, and it was an even
bigger deal when every single one of those audience members

(31:19):
realized they had to pay income tax on their cars
thousands and thousands of dollars. Well, that's how contest prizes work.
They're taxable. And Steven didn't have a few thousand dollars
to spare.

Speaker 6 (31:32):
Yeah, Unfortunately, I was only in possession of it until
the following September, and I had to sell it. And
I've read on the internet that a lot of people
thought I sold it to go to school, and that
was not the case. I had to sell it to
pay the taxes on it. My family was comfortable but
we didn't have extra money, so we did not have

(31:52):
twenty five hundred dollars to give the Dirs unfortunately.

Speaker 1 (31:57):
But where do you sell in a Tory medallion?

Speaker 6 (32:00):
I took it to a local coin dealer and just
to show them, well, the value was supposedly twenty five thousand,
and he offered me like fourteen thousand.

Speaker 7 (32:10):
I'm like what, there's no way, so I left.

Speaker 6 (32:14):
Then I go to another one and his offer was
slightly higher. But then my dad says, well, here's what
they did. As as you showed that thing to that guy,
he made a phone call in the entire area. Probably
had like a limit they were going to set and
what they're going to pay for this thing. The only
other way I could have got more money was to
literally hold onto it and advertise it and maybe some

(32:37):
guy who wanted it for a collection of some kind.

Speaker 7 (32:39):
But once again I didn't have any time. I had
to pay taxes on it, so.

Speaker 1 (32:43):
Even though it had a declared value of twenty five
thousand dollars, that wasn't necessarily the street value of it.

Speaker 6 (32:51):
I ended up selling it for fourteen eight hundred. But
if you look at it, there's a small sword that
was on it. Yeah, I kept that part. He offered
me fifteen to six, and I said, well, I want
to keep the little sword in this sense.

Speaker 7 (33:04):
Okay, that's about eight hundred.

Speaker 1 (33:06):
The sword stayed on his nightstand. Then a little while
later it disappeared.

Speaker 6 (33:12):
And unfortunately, about a year or so later the little
sword that I just always kept on my dresser.

Speaker 1 (33:17):
Apristole all told Stephen had about fifteen thousand dollars in cash,
and he knew exactly what he wanted to do with
the money. The Pontiac Fierro was a new model, two
door sports car that was fuel efficient. Pontiac hired halland
Oates to endorse it. If you went to a Hall
and Oats concert in nineteen eighty four, you'd see lots

(33:39):
of fierro ads and maybe a few display models. This
was what Stephen wanted, a sporty commuter car. Hey, he
lived in Detroit. Cars were a big deal.

Speaker 6 (33:51):
I bought a nineteen eighty four Fiero and that was
a disaster. The engine only lasted about thirty months, and
then of course they gave you another one that was defective.
So unfortunately, four years later I had no car and
nothing to show for either After making all the payments
on it.

Speaker 1 (34:11):
The Fierrero retailed for about ten thousand dollars, so Stephen
didn't spend every cent on it, but a lot of it.
The rest went to other bills. But he didn't mind
that so much. There was still lots of contests to go,
more sword Quest worlds to be conquered. He began playing Fireworld,
the second in the series. He could, in theory, compete

(34:33):
in all four games and win each one. For Stephen,
Fireworld would be a chance to become a two time champion.
For Jackie, it would be a chance at redemption. For
others it would be a chance to get their foot
in the contest and get their hands on the second prize,
the Chalice. But Fireworld created a problem that Atari didn't

(34:55):
quite know how to deal with. Unlike earth World, which
was almost impossible to solve, Fireworld allowed players to share
a strategy to network.

Speaker 2 (35:05):
But some of these people would get on the phone
and they would beg you and push you and push
you and try to get you to break it down
to where you would tell them the answer how you
came up with it. So many people won the second one,
and I think that some of the other guys that
were finalists for Earth World. I think some of them
gave out secrets, you know, kind of let their friends

(35:28):
in on it.

Speaker 1 (35:28):
A community around sword Quest was forming. Ataria's second lap
of the contest wouldn't have seven finalists, it would have
over seventy, and they would push Atari to its breaking point.
That's next time on a Legend of sword Quest.

Speaker 8 (35:48):
The Legend of sword Quest is a production of iHeart
Podcasts and School of Humans. This episode was written by
Jake Rosson and hosted by Jamie Loftus producers are Miranda
Hawkins and Josh Fischer. Executive producers are Virginia Prescott, L. C. Crowley,
Brandon Barr, and Jason English. Our show editor is Mary Doo.
Audio engineering by Graham Gibson, Research and fact checking by

(36:12):
Austin Thompson and Jake Rosson. Original score by Jesse Niswanger.
This episode was sound designed by Josh Fisher, mixing and
mastering by Jake Cook. Show logo by Lucy Quintonia. Voices
in this episode are provided by Miranda Hawkins and Graham Parker.
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