Denis Through the Drinking Glass

Cancelled successor

Applications Software later worked on another adventure in a similar vein, called The Tebbit (a play on and a reference to UK politician Norman Tebbit). The game was never released despite being advertised in mid 1984. In November of that year the IRA blew up The Grand Hotel in Brighton, where the Conservative Party was holding its annual conference. Tebbit and his wife were seriously injured, which surely ended any chance of the game surfacing.

Title

If this game's name rings a little bell, you are thinking of Lewis Carroll's book Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, the sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

First commercial Quill game

The Spectrum version of Denis Through the Drinking Glass was the first commercially released game written using The Quill. It was released on November 5th, 1983 not long after The Quill first appeared.

Poetic style

Author Roger Taylor liked to say that Denis was "the only adventure game written entirely in doggerel".

Old joke references

One of the reasons the game is almost impossibly hard to play now is that it assumes that as well as a detailed knowledge of UK politics and media circa 1983, you are also familiar with a number of corny old jokes. For example, one of the early puzzles in the game will only make sense if you know that the answer to "Why do policemen have bigger balls than firemen?" is "Because they sell more tickets!"