How to play Venture online
- Move Winky: arrow keys
- Fire an arrow: Space bar (Winky shoots in the direction he is facing)
- Start a new game: F12 (the console’s Reset switch)
- Choose a skill level: F4 and F9 (the left and right difficulty switches, see below)
- Save and load your progress: Ctrl + 0–9 saves to a slot, Alt + 0–9 loads it
Gameplay
The game starts on a map of the dungeon, where Winky is just a small dot in the hallways between the rooms. Big Hallmonsters roam these halls, and your arrows cannot harm them, so you have to slip past them into a room. Inside, the view zooms in: the room fills the screen, and you can see the treasure and the monsters guarding it. One room, the Wall Room, has deadly electrified walls instead of monsters, and you cannot shoot there at all.
Shot monsters leave bodies behind, and touching a monster, alive or dead, costs you a life. If you stay in a room too long, a Hallmonster comes in after you. Once you take a room’s treasure and leave, that room is closed for good. When every treasure on a level has been collected, Winky goes down to a new, harder set of rooms. You get four lives per game.
Treasures are worth at least 200 points and monsters at least 100, and both are worth more the deeper you go. There is one catch: shooting a monster only scores once you have already picked up that room’s treasure.
Skill levels
Venture has four skill levels, set with the two difficulty switches before you press Reset. Each level starts Winky in a different part of the dungeon, and Skill 1 is the easiest.
- Skill 1: left B, right B
- Skill 2: left B, right A
- Skill 3: left A, right B
- Skill 4: left A, right A
Tips
- Treasure first, then shoot. Monsters give no points until you hold the treasure, so grab it early and then clear the room for points if you have time.
- Treat bodies as walls. A dead monster is still deadly to touch, so don’t shoot one that is standing in your only path out.
- Keep an eye on the clock. Lingering brings a Hallmonster into the room. Don’t get greedy with monster points.
- Time the Wall Room. You can’t fire there, and the manual says only good timing gets you the treasure, so watch the walls for a moment before you go in.
- Wait at the doorway. On the map, pause next to a room’s entrance until the nearest Hallmonster moves away.
History
Exidy released the Venture arcade machine in 1981. Coleco licensed it for home systems, and it was one of the launch games for the ColecoVision in 1982, followed by this Atari 2600 cartridge and an Intellivision version in 1983. The 2600 conversion was made for Coleco by CommaVid, a small developer that also published its own 2600 games. The Hallmonsters play a similar role to Evil Otto in Berzerk, pushing you to keep moving. Coleco’s home version received a Certificate of Merit for best arcade-to-home translation at the 4th annual Arkie Awards. Atari later reissued Venture for the 2600 under its own label in the late 1980s.
