It's nineteen ninety nine and a twenty something writer named Clive Young is living in Brooklyn, New York. Like most people in this tale, he's into Atari, but by now, being into Atari is a retro thing, not a cutting edge thing, and for Clive in particular, it's also a budget thing.
Jen X grows up. You know, I moved out and I was absolutely broke as anything because a big recession, just as you know you're getting economically established in the world, I guess is the best way to put it. So I came across my old Atari in my parents' basement and I was like, all right, well, you know that doesn't cost anything.
As you've probably guessed, that's Clive. He was an Atari gamer from way back, and when he has to keep a tight grip on his wallet, that dusty old console suddenly seems interesting.
You know, you can't afford to go out, you can't do anything, but you can sit around the apartment and play old Atari.
One of the best plays, says to find old games are thrift stores. Remember this was before games were ultra valuable collector's items, sealed in plastic cases and selling for thousands on eBay. Old games were mostly considered junk. So Clive went to thrift shops browsing for old, sorry vintage Atari titles. But then he had a reason to walk into a new shop in a different part of the state.
Love.
I was living in Brooklyn at the time, but I was dating this girl who she lived out in Long Island, which you know is the birthplace of American suburbia, and I would go visit her on the weekends and go out to all the garage sales because I was if you're living on an extraordinarily limited budget, such as I was, and I would come across all these old Atari games that were like twenty five cents fifty cents. I wound
up collecting literally hundreds of Atari games. I think before I basically quit, I probably had the better part of probably four hundred and fifty different games.
That's how a thrifty Clive finds himself at Edley Electronics on Long Island, which was less of a thrift store and more of a junk store full of well loved electronics gear. Think of it like a best buy, only everything is cheap and probably missing a plug.
Me once every two three months, I'd stick my head in there and that particular day, I got a call from a friend who also knew the place, and he said, oh, they got some great Atari stuff in there, going so yeah, I stopped by. He had already swiped some of the really good stuff that I never found, like the Atari Gremlins and things like that.
Gremlins based on the movie is one of the more rare Atari titles. It would be a good find. But that's not what Clive sees. As he rummages through this box of Atari, he spot something odd. It's an envelope.
There was a letter envelope just tucked in the side of a shoe box, and I opened it and I found those photos.
At first, Clive isn't sure what those photos depict, but they turn out to be an amazing discovery, far more interesting than an old Gremlins game. Even though seventeen years had passed since the Sword Quest titles had first been released, there had never been any absolute confirmation that all five prizes for the contest had been made. It was possible Atari just made them as needed, and only two were confirmed to have been handed out. Maybe there wasn't a
sword or a philosopher Stone after all. Maybe fans were chasing something that didn't even exist. But as Clive begins sifting through the old photos, he realizes that he's holding a part of Atari history.
I could tell it clearly has said something to do with the actual company, because one of the photos has a giant Atari logo up on the wall in the background.
Clive keeps flipping through the photos. There, among snapshots of the Fireworld contest and some very retro hairstyles, is a clear shot of the grand prize, the Sword of Ultimate Sorcery in ety Electronics. Clive is holding real, irrefutable proof the sword for the contest, which has never surfaced, is real. But what do you do with this information? And more importantly, how do you make sure you leave the store with the first and maybe only image of the most sought
after prize in gaming history. After all, no one said those photos were for sale for iHeartRadio. This is the legend of sword Quest. I'm your host, Jamie Loftus, and this is episode five Stay Gold. When Clive found those photos and his accidental archaeological dig at Edley Electronics, he was resurrecting memories not just of sword Quest, but Atari as a whole. It had struggled in the intervening years, changing hands multiple times, and was constantly in a foot
race with other video game manufacturers. Atari, like sword Quest had imploded.
It's also a little bit of like a Hubris thing, like, look at this big contest that they had planned and these big prizes that they had planned, and it never quite comes to conclusion. So it's almost like a metaphor for the industry and Atari itself in a way.
But finding moldy photos of a gaming contest seems kind of unnecessary. Shouldn't someone have been taking photos or video? Well, No, Atari had what you might call a poor institutional memory. There wasn't much of a paper trail that was retained for the contest when Atari changed hands in nineteen eighty four. It only obfuscated things further. That's why Clive's find was such a big deal, and it's why sword Quest remains
such an enigmatic event. No one was taking notes. Each of the photos tell a little bit of the story. There's Michael ride Out, one of only two winners, standing over his prize, the chalice, which is still in its ornate glass case. The curtains of the hotel's ballroom are open behind him letting in light. There's an image that has row after row of players, an older woman pacing in the space between them, like a stern headmistress at
a boarding school. Another one has glimpses of other contestants, all wearing a red Fireworld t shirt that atari probably handed out like a team uniform. There's a close up of the chalice, a stern man standing sentry next to it, and of course the sword. It sits at an angle on a small table, a white cloth underneath it, a gold and jewel encrusted hilt sparkling. Even though the photo
itself isn't too sharp. Maybe some people thought the sword would be cheap, looking like a movie price, but it's radiant, it's well crafted. To a lot of people, this would all look vaguely weird, like a Dungeons and Dragons game gone high tech. But Clive knew a lot of the background. Sword Quest had been a part of his childhood. Like many gamers, he had screamed in frustration while trying to win these prizes.
When I was like thirteen, fourteen years old. I mean, that was big selling point of the game was get it and you'll figure it out, and you could win. You know, this cool stuff, and of course it's all based on clues in the comic book and this and that, but you know, being a fourteen year old kid, the comic book gets torn up and of course lost in the house within like you know, a week.
Finding the photos at Edley Electronics was about as likely as winning the contest. It was more of a junkyard for electronics. Personal effects didn't really belong there.
It was where electronics went to die and where hobbyist electronics went to die. So there's you know, half of a model airplane, there's a couple of broken turned there's boxes of old tubes, any random random and I cannot stress random enough, like heating coils of just somebody would need it somehow. All this stuff would wind up in the metal shelves at this store.
Clearly, someone probably a contestant, stuck the photos in a giant box of Atari games and forgot about them. Then they were donated or maybe sold for a song and forgotten until Clive showed up, And it was serendipitous that he did. Whoever ultimately picked up the photos needed to know about sword quest, about golden chalices and swords. Otherwise the photos would probably be pitched into the trash, and to this day, atari collectors would be debating over whether
the sword had ever even been made. Clive knew this was important, but they weren't in his possession just yet. According to Clive, the clerks at Edley couldn't completely be trusted not to give someone a hard time. That's because the store was manned by two cranky older men who resembled Statler and Waldorf from the Muppet Show.
It was a strange place. It was about the size of the small supermarket. It was run by these two old guys who sat behind the counter, and they just had duop playing all day, and all they did was bicker, bicker with each other, bicker with their customers, the whole bit.
The question was should Clive try to slip the photos past them or keep them in sight. If he showed them off, maybe they'd hesitate, ask him why he's looking to buy someone else's personal photos and demand he hand them over, or worse.
It's interesting. If I bring it up to the counter, the two cranky guys are either going to say I can't have it, or they're going to say, oh, that's twenty bucks.
Remember Clive's disposable income was minimal, so we opted for a little subversion. With a deep breath, he went up to the counter.
You know, it's some random photos that looked like they came out some of these photo albums. There wasn't a lot of thought put into it. I just sort of put in a pile of stuff that I was buying from them, like with the you know, manuals or whatever, and they didn't even glance at it. I probably bought the whole pile for like five bucks, I'm sure.
Clive went back home to Brooklyn and thought about what he should do. He could, in theory, scan them himself and find someplace online to post them, but he also needed them to be vetted in some way. He thought he knew what they were, but he wasn't sure. Remember this was nineteen ninety nine, and it wasn't so easy to just look up information about a retrogaming contest, so.
It's like, all right, this has to be some sort of officially sanctioned thing. At the time, there was a really, at least in the very small world of Atari fans, a big zine called twenty six hundred Connection. So I sent the photos to them because I figured they'll know what the heck this is, you know, I mean, I had a pretty good idea, all right, it must have to do with that contest.
Twenty six hundred. Connection was a fanzine or fan magazine for Atari fans. They published the photos and the Atari fan community was intrigued. The photos also wound up online, naturally, and Kurt Vendel, the late Atari historian, shot Clive an email.
I remember I got an email from asking, Hey, would you like to donate these to my museum? And the thought was no, but.
Clive wanted to hang on to the photos.
Finding the photos was one of the best moments that I had out of the collecting, because a lot of the collecting, particularly at that time, I mean, the atmosphere and the attitude may have changed, but a lot of the collecting really came down to, hey, look what I found. I have it. You don't, whether online or meeting people in person or whatever. And you know, there's a certain amount of okay, bragging rights, absolutely, but you know it's
maybe not the best look on anyone. And I was as guilty of that one as anybody else.
There was some pride in making a discovery but Clive also thought the pictures were a kind of public record, and seeing them in twenty six hundred Connection gave them a kind of validity. The fine reignited conversation about the fate of the sword quest prizes, and it killed the theory that Atari had only had the prizes made prior to each contest. If they made the sword the final prize,
then they almost certainly made all of them. Here's rus Perry Junior, who edited twenty six hundred Connection.
I remember back in the day some people speculated that they weren't actually making the prizes until like right before the contest the championship. But the problem is, we've seen the picture of the sword. It does give you an indication that maybe they did actually make them all at the beginning. So the theories about them, like especially the Philosopher's Stone the last one, probably didn't exist. Well, it might have, especially with a contest. I know, again, there's
so many legal restrictions. It is possible they had to actually have the promised prizes forehand legally before they could announce the contest and the prizes that.
Could be true legally, Atari might not have been able to promise prizes that weren't yet made either way, two were awarded and accounted for the talisman and chalice, and three were not the crown, the Philosopher's Stone, and the sword. The sword at least was now a confirmed physical object, but that still doesn't account for what happened to them When the contest was canceled with the sword reel. It
made one prevailing theory much stronger. That theory was presented by Kurt Vendell, who once insisted that after speaking at length with the Tari employees, he had determined their fate. Could Atari have simply sent the prizes back to where they were made at the Franklin Mint, like returned them for a refund. Could the Franklin Mint have come back into possess of the prizes. Okay, it's a theory, let's test it out. But we know you're wondering, what the hell is the Franklin Mint.
The American dollar is easy, but if you want the Russian ruble or Japan's five hundred yin or say shells ten rupees. If you want the coins that are legal tender in over one hundred countries, you can either travel the world or telephone the Franklin Mint for coin sets of all nations. The Franklin Mint has done it for you, worked with central banks and government.
It's human nature to collect things. Maybe it's books, maybe it's comics or baseball cards, atari games, rubber bands. We hoard things, hopefully not in a way that lands us on television for all sorts of reasons. The Franklin Mint turned that urge into a multi million dollar business. In nineteen sixty four, a man named Joseph Siegel took notice of two events, the death of General Douglas MacArthur and
news reports of a run on silver dollars. Siegel realized that if people were so hungry for silver coins, maybe he could get them to buy commemorative silver medals, like say, one depicting General MacArthur. This led to the creation of the National Commemorative Society. But the National Commemorative Society needed someone to make their commemoratives. Supposedly, Seagull tried a few options, but wasn't happy with their quality, so he founded a
new company called General Numismatics, with a division called Franklin Mint. Eventually, Franklin Mint became the dominant part of General Numismatics, which would soon change its name to reflect that, and among many other lines of business, was selling their own limited runs of coins and medals to collectors. Tell people you're only going to make ten thousand Queen Elizabeth the Second coins and give them a deadline to order, then watch them develop a nineteen sixties version of Fomo the fear
of missing out. This strategy worked really well early on. Joseph only made the coins after he had gotten the orders and was in no danger of getting stuck with unsold inventory. The themes were endless, History's most Famous Women, the history of the Catholic Church of Richard Nixon commemorative medal, because otherwise Richard Nixon might.
Be forgotten, because people have got to know whether or not their president's a crook.
Well, I'm not a crook. I've earned everything I've got.
The Mint developed a devoted clientele, and their ideas got more and more ambitious, maybe too ambitious. One employee, overwhelmed with all the Mint's projects, was said to have keeled over at his desk, dead of a heart attack. In nineteen seventy one, the company struck a deal with astronauts Alan Shephard, Edgar Mitchell and Stuart Russa on the Apollo fourteen Moon mission to carry a payload of silver medals
into space. The idea was that the silver could then be used to make commemorative coins, with the pitch being that the material had been outside the Earth's atmosphere and near the lunar surface. It was actually a pretty clever conceit. The problem was that the Franklin Mint never bothered to get NASA's permission. The agreement was between the Mint and the astronauts, and while they weren't explicitly compensated, the astronauts got to keep many of the two hundred medals they
carried into space. Some were given out to friends and family. Of those the Mint got back, they used many of them to make into mini coins. The stunt actually helped to change NASA's protocols on bringing personal items into space. It's not often a company changes space policy, but the Mint managed it. However. The Mint's biggest obstacle came later
on its home planet. In nineteen seventy eight, the CBS television news magazine show Six to Minutes devoted a segment to the Franklin Mint, and, like most profiles of businesses on sixty minutes. At the time, it wasn't glowing. The show pointed out the fallacies of creating artificial demand by limiting production runs and then having collectors expect those items will increase in value. According to the report, many of their collectible items were only worth their melt value, that is,
the intrinsic value of the raw material. There was no premium placed on the fact that the coins had images of famous historical or political figures, or that they had been to the moon. After the report, the stock price for the mint dropped by a dollar. The shine on the mint seemed to dull. It was time for the Franklin Mint to pivot. Joseph Siegel had left back in nineteen seventy four and later started QVC, one of the
first home shopping channels. Striking coins was no longer the windfall it had been, but the idea of something being instantly and purposely rare was still viable. The mint itself needed a makeover, and in nineteen eighty one it got it. That's when Warner Communications bought the company. They were able to because Atari's success had filled their bank account and made it possible to acquire other businesses. No longer was the Mint appealing exclusively to coin collectors like Warner and
even Atari itself. They were branching out into pop culture as a whole. Over the years, they'd try their hand at handsome leather bound book collections of literary classics. Star Trek fans could buy a replica of the Starship Enterprise. Wizard of Oz fans could procure Dorothy dolls. One tiny ufo was accompanied by soil taken from Roswell, New Mexico. Yes, the Mint sold dirt and did pretty well. Civil War Chess sets, premium Monopoly game boards with tiny gold pieces.
There were figurines and glass sculptures, Elvis Presley offerings, and miniature rolls voices. These were premium items made with durable, expensive materials, and they cost money, sometimes hundreds of dollars, and they encouraged a lot of collected all brand loyalty collectors filled houses and cabinets with Franklin Mint stuff. It was a pre Beanie baby craze. So the Mint did another clever thing. They made it possible to purchase their
collectibles in installments. Maybe it was hard for someone to grab a porcelain butterfly bell with twenty four carrot gold for sixty five dollars, But what if it was in three easy payments of twenty one dollars sixty seven cents plus shipping and handling.
Of course, if money talks, here is endless conversation for your family to treasure now and in years to come. For a handsome hard bound cases, accompany the collection for storage and easy reference. In charge and start your collection.
With the strategy of offering affordable art worked. By nineteen eighty three, just ten percent of the Mint's earnings were from minted items. The rest of the four hundred million dollars in sales came from mass produced art. Inside their manufacturing facility in Waua, Pennsylvania, were hundreds of employees and technicians handling and smelting all manner of materials. A vault on the factory floor contained the most precious materials, diamonds, rubies.
Workers were checked coming and going to make sure they weren't leaving any heavier than when they came in. While many of the products were sold in limited runs, some were one of a kind. In nineteen eighty one, the Mint made a golden key with a value of thirty five thousand dollars at the behest of Stanley Home Products, which wanted to give it away during the company's fiftieth anniversary to one of their star employees. The other major
project was, of course, sword Quest. The Franklin Mint and Atari already had a kind of working relationship because the Mint had its own publishing arm, printing its own magazine for collectors. Warner tasked it with publishing Atari Age, the fan publication for all Things Atari. The Mint even sold Atari consoles to employees at its company store. Warner took it a step further, tasking the Mint with making the
sword Quest prizes. Normally, this is where we'd interview the technician or artist who made the prizes, like the blacksmith who crafted the sword, and it's possible they're out there somewhere. But according to Robert Murphy, a renowned sculptor and artist who spent fourteen years at the Mint, over twenty two hundred people worked there in the early nineteen eighties, and the people who labored on the prizes may not have had any idea what they were working on. Robert told
us it could have even been him. This is what he said to us via email.
Thinking back on working in the pewter department at the Mint. I myself may have worked on one of these pieces. We never had any idea where a particular model that we made was heading. Each job had an individual work number assigned to it. We would have a design sketch or rough prototype delivered to our work area, not having any idea where the final model was going to. Items like swords often had pewter handguards that ended up being
gold plated and set with stones. We never had a clue where the final product ended up.
It's likely the prizes went through several departments at the Mint with no one knowing the ultimate outcome of what it was they were working on. It was almost like government work, no one person knowing everything. Given the value of the prizes, it may have been a way to keep employees from being tempted to, you know, conquer quest by simply running off with the treasures. But they were crafts people, not just workers on some collectible's mass assembly line.
Roberts said his co workers were quote old school craftsmen, at least a couple from prestigious European engraving and jewelry backgrounds. All of them were miles ahead of me in terms of model making skills unquote. That was part of the Mint's approach in the nineteen sixties. They had hired the well respected engraver Gilroy Roberts, who previously worked in the US Mint, as their chief engraver. The Sword Quest pieces were made with real care. We know the prizes began
to leave Pennsylvania no later than nineteen eighty three. That's because at least one the talisman had to be on display for the first contest, held in May of that
year in Sunnyvale, California. Thanks to Clive, we know the sword exists, and thanks to winner Stephen Bell's check stub, which he was enough to share with us, we know the contest ended without the remaining three prizes being handed out in August nineteen eighty six, and we know the late Atari historian Kurt Vendel insisted the rest of the prizes had been returned to the Mint. Kurt wrote about it,
and other Atari historians have said similar things. Here's Ken van Merzbergen, an Atari fan in programmer who knew Kurt.
He talked to a lot of people at the Franklin Mint who had worked there back in the day. And we believe that they were actually sent back, probably on order from Warner to recoup the cost of this The sorder with fifty thousand, but each individual prize was worth twenty five k at the time.
But Kurt never related to Ken who exactly he had spoken with.
No, he never shared that information with me. And unfortunately, as you know that information is now lost.
A lot of things relating to sword Quest turn up missing. But if the Franklin Mint theory of reclaimed treasure is true, then what happened next is enough to put a stake or sword through your heart. It's a tragedy, one even worse than paying one hundred dollars for Elvis Presley's pink Cadillac and miniature. For years, the Franklin Mint's facilities were a tremendous labor force in Pennsylvania. It employed a large number of people who needed to assist in delivering Star
Trek collectibles to ravenous fans. But the facility also had another purpose. Tucked inside the circular building was a museum devoted to everything Franklin Mint. Every year, up to one hundred thousand people would enter the doors of the museum.
The visitors area was a shrine to everything the Mint had built over the years, not only in collectors' coins, but their limited run items, thousands and thousands of purposeful art pieces, including expensive Faberge eggs and tiny Harley Das Davidson's. If the prizes were returned to the Mint, it's possible they could have wound up here. Inside are raiders of the lost Ark style tribute to all things Franklin Mint.
A gleaming crown, a towering stone, a sharp sword encased behind glass, all monuments to the Mint's ingenuity and craftsmanship, nestled near frank Sinatra and Scarlett O'Harra dolls, or a John Wayne commemorative dinner plate. Maybe a tiny placard advising visitors of their significance in Franklin Mint history. Here'sit's the crown of video gaming Royalty. No player ever deemed worthy enough to wear it. Here hangs on the sword, no sword quester ever strong enough to wield it. But the
Franklin Mint Museum was no mere museum. In fitting with the company's overall mission of commercial art, it was also a gift shop. Most everything in the museum was for sale. If the sword quest piece is wound up here. It's highly possible a strident Franklin Mint die hard collector would have been eager to possess a one of a kind piece. Never Mind it was made for an Atari contest. It would have been the most limited of additions, an addition of one. Yes, the items would have been pricey, but
Mint fans weren't all installment buyers. One replica of an Egyptian necklace went for ninety five hundred dollars. A diamond encrusted Star of the North wristwatch went for ten thousand dollars. There was a strong demand for swords too. The Mint struck blades inspired by Charlemagne. The Japanese Samurai Camelot, a bejeweled sword ready for wall display, would not have been
out of place. That's one possibility. If the Mint took the prizes back, someone could also have made the decision to route them elsewhere to one of the Mint's growing numbers of retail shops around the country. These boutiques were full of Franklin Mint merchandise. Someone somewhere could have packed up the items in newspaper and nailed them shut inside a wooden crate, shuttled them to a Franklin mint shop
and lost any trace of their existence. There's one more potential outcome of returning the prizes to the Mint, and it's probably the most frustrating of them all. When Atari made the decision to cancel sword Quest in nineteen eighty six, they still had a legal obligation to offer a settlement to the players who had earned a spot in the finals and a chance to play for the sword. So Stephen Bell and Michael Ridout, the two finalists, received a
check for fifteen thousand dollars each. The other players due to play in a water world contest the third game in the series, got two thousand or twenty five hundred dollars each. So in a world where Atari was now strapped for cash and conserving every dollar, where would that fifty thousand dollars come from? Do you remember what happened
to those Astronaut coins. There's a version of this story where a tar sorry, desperate to end this contest, winds up selling the prizes back to the Franklin Mint, which pays them money for the raw materials, money that then goes to paying the finalists. The Mint, which has no need for unique guitari prize items, considers it money well spent for silver, gold and jewels. The silver and gold is melted down, repurposed into any number of other collectibles.
Someone's letter opener made from the reclaimed silver of the sword, and with that the Sword Quest prizes quite literally vanish from existence. Here's Ken van Merzbergen again.
Well, I think is that all the stones are probably removed and repurposed, and the gold and silver were melted down to turn into other product because they were still owned by the Franklin Mint at that time, and I think they belong to Franklin Mint.
It's a sobering thought, like a copy of Action Comics number one being fed into a paper shredder. And it's certainly possible. It makes financial sense for a tarorry, but there are some important details to consider. Martin Goldberg, an Atari historian who worked with the lank Kurt Vendel, later said Warner executive Manny Gerard told him the prize as went back to the Mint, but when we recently spoke with Manny, he couldn't corroborate that. Here's Manny.
I gotta tell you, I don't even remember the name. But then again, I don't remember a name very much, any boy, But I have no recollection of any of that I don't remember, so I certainly don't remember the prize.
It's a test of anyone's memory, and we're not saying his lack of recall proves anything, only that we asked someone who might have known where the prizes went or if they were returned to the Mint, and he just doesn't know. Keep in mind too, that Manny left Warner in nineteen eighty four, two years before the contest was cut short. The story has other holes in it. Back in the eighties, Atari wasn't the only ailing business in
the Warner portfolio. The Franklin Mint was another, and so in nineteen eighty five, Warner sold off a majority stake in the Mint to Stuart and Linda Resnik, a married couple who happened to be fabulously wealthy. Their company, American Protection Industries, had made a fortune in home security, and Linda wanted to get into the collectibles game. The Mint was theirs for about one hundred and sixty million dollars,
probably not payable in three easy installments. That means Atari was far removed from having any kind of inside track with the Franklin Mint. Atari had been sold off in nineteen eighty four, the Mint in nineteen eighty five. The contest was officially canceled in nineteen eighty six. The two were no longer corporate partners and any dealings or relationships they had were likely dissolved. So why would Atari approach the Mint and why would the Mint offer to lend
a hand without any corporate connection. We were able to contact Stuart Resnik, who was in charge of the Mint during those years, and he has no memory whatsoever of Atari sending the Mint a crate full of video game prizes to be sold off for fifty thousand dollars or more. That's not remotely definitive proof it didn't happen, But on the other hand, it does seem like the kind of
thing you might remember. It's hard to believe that Atari would willingly ship off the prizes back to Pennsylvania, particularly when it took the company two years to reach what they felt was a satisfactory resolution to the contest. If Stephen Bell and Michael Rideout had refused, it's possible they would have had to see the contest through, and if they did, they couldn't have given them a bunch of
melted silver and gold in a puddle. The prizes would have needed to survive at least until the summer of nineteen eighty six, well passed the mint's new ownership and Manny's tenure. There's also Robert Murphy, the sculptor we mentioned earlier time at the Mint. He says he never heard of any kind of repurposing program for materials, but he did add that sometimes unwanted or unused items were sold
to employees at a discounted price. There were trailer sales in the Mint's parking lot where Robert says workers could
buy things for pennies on the dollar. Of course, Robert can't say for certain he saw the sword Quest prizes during one of these sales, but he does remember what he called some camelot type items, ornate products from Arthurian legend, like swords and chalices, things that could have easily been the sword Quest prizes on display at the museum, sold to a visitor or employee, sent to a retail store, or just simply destroyed all possible fates if the prizes
found their way back to the Franklin Mint. That seemed dire and final The Mint's plant is gone now, and so is the museum, raised and paved over in twenty nineteen, though it's changed hands several times since the Resinus bought it in nineteen eighty five. The Mint itself still exists, pedaling coins, toy cars, and patriotic coffee mugs online, but there's nowhere it could hang a sword if it still
had one. There's one more detail worth mentioning. Of the three remaining prizes, one of them was the Philosopher's Stone. While it did have a gold display case, it was made of white jade, and you can't melt down jade. For a long time, it's been accepted that Clive Young discovered the only known photo of the sword. As it turns out, all these years later, someone did take a glamour shot of the sword a second photo. In reporting this story, we found several newspapers from October nineteen eighty
two that had a picture in it. An unnamed technician from the Franklin Mint is pictured, hoped in a white, clean suit as though he were working in a laboratory. He's cradling the sword of Ultimate Sorcery, It's hilt visible. The caption says it was struck at the mint for atari, along with the chalice, crown and talisman. It was a photo distributed for promotional use, Lost and forgotten. The man is looking at something that is soon to disappear, but
something that absolutely positively existed. This photo, like the ones Clive found, is a little like a tiny fossilized bone from a creature thought to be extinct. The images of the prizes are incredibly rare. Most exist only as illustrations in gaming magazines. Without them, it's likely no one would be entirely convinced the prizes had ever been real at all. Maybe that's what the photographer at the contest wanted, proof not just of the prizes, but of their experience.
Here's Clive, a good enough player that you wound up getting to be in this contest. When you have someone take a photo of yourself, or even just take a photo yourself like next to the story, it as opposed to just the sword by itself or something. So it's sort of an interesting thing of what's not in the photos, which kind of makes me think maybe, like you know, there were a couple of more personal photos that maybe
in somebody's photo albums somewhere in Levittown. But these were the ones that somebody whoever it was, just sort of tucked into an envelope and kept with their stuff. The photos kind of look almost like photos that you take is proof if you were a kid back then, you know, like picks or it didn't happen. Yeah, this is really what it looks like. Yes, that's the guy who wanted
Yes there really was a chalice. My extrapolating with that actually knowing what I'm talking about, These photos strike me as these were the photos you take to school to say this is what I did on my summer vacation.
Today, the contest would be all over social media. Someone would be live streaming it. But then these photos might be the only tangible remnants of that experience. We've managed to speak to a few of the contestants, but so many more are lost to time, their stories, their ambitions, their experiences.
So there is certainly a huge base of folks who know about it, but beyond it, it's sort of like, all right, well there are people who managed to do this, but you don't know who they are. And you know, today something like this would be all over the place. You could look it up on the Internet. If there were forty fifty sixty people who were in the Fireworld contest and it happened today, you'd know everybody's names. Everybody would have it up on their social media. Hey I
did this way. It is a mystery, And so that mysteriousness, even if it's not an intentional mysteriousness, just purely because so much of this is lost in the mists of time, that gives it a certain are of something special. It was also the first time, least I'm aware that something this big was attempted by one of the video game companies. And it also because it happened just as the first push of video games kind of peaked, the entire video game industry sort of collapsed in the early eighties.
For Clive, the photos are perfectly emblematic of sword Quest. A lot of threads to tug on.
Oh sure, it's a story with so many loose ends. Inevitably, just because that last game never came out.
One loose end we can tie up right now. Remember that Clive was in Long Island to see his girlfriend. That's the whole reason he found the photos. She's no longer his girlfriend.
This girl who became my wife for the last on teen decades.
Spoken like a true romantic. Clive's sword Quest had a happy ending, but for the rest of the Atari faithful, his discovery prompted more questions, but they wouldn't have to wait long for an answer. Just two years after the photos were found, someone else delivered an even bigger bombshell. And that's someone was Ken Van Mersberkin.
And then all of a sudden, this prototype in quotes my air Quotes shows up on Neebay sword Quest Airworld like No, can't.
Be Airworld, the lost sword Quest game That's next time on sword Quest.
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 Fisher. 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 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 logan by Lucy Quintonia. The voice in this episode was provided by Jason English.