Valhalla is one of those games where it's difficult to find out any details. It was the first game of the London-based company MiCROL, which renamed itself Legend soon after, even before the Commodore 64 version was published the next year. The ZX version of Valhalla is therefore the only game to ever have been released under the MiCROL label. Movisoft, which is occasionally listed as the developer, was in truth a technique. MiCROL/Legend aimed to make games more movie-like, several years before the Amiga and Defender of the Crown.
Valhalla was quite probably the first animated graphic adventure game ever. You type in your commands, and the stick figures on the screen act accordingly. This is the way the classic adventure games worked until they changed to a point and click interface around 1990, but Valhalla came before King's Quest. The parser was quite good and understand multi-part sentences. The manual contained a complete list of supported words. If you typed in swearwords, or called a certain character—Boldir—Baldy, one Mary would come on screen, declare she was not amused, and slap you.
Valhalla had a sort of alignment system. The characters you interact with are either good or bad. If you help the good ones a lot, they will help you too. Or you can help the bad guys. You've got to take your pick. One of the makers of Wasteland later said in an interview he would have liked such a feature in the game but thought of it too late. It was implemented, though not in an entirely convincing way, another decade later in the Fallout games.
Valhalla is based on Norse legends, which got me interested to begin with. While Vikings are popular characters (usually, of course, with the completely ahistoric horned helmets) games that really go into the mythology are comparatively rare, at least in the West. In Japanese games, elements of Norse mythology are found frequently. Elsewhere, there's mainly Ragnorok, which confusingly in Europe bore the name Valhalla too.
No matter from which side you look at it: Valhalla is a remarkable game that would deserve to be better known.
The company, Legend, always remained a bit of a
mystery. They were, as chairman John Peel put it, not, by nature,
a high profile company.
Legend consisted mainly of John Peel and
his wife Jan, Peter Moxham for marketing, and half a dozen programmers
working in-house or on a contractual basis. For Valhalla, the
development team consisted of Graham Asher, Richard Edwards, Charles
Goodwin, James Learmont, Jan Ostler, and Andrew Owen.
Legend produced at least three more games,
The Great Space Race (which was a flop and gave
them a reputation for hype), the shoot-em-'up
Komplex, which
seems not to have been stellar either, and its sequel Komplex
City, which pleased the critics more.
