The Internet Archive seems to have a working 2021 snapshot, for what it’s worth.
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Episode 19 is out. When Dr. Jonathan Partington was on Ep 16, he recommended we play Monsters of Murdac. So we have.
We also explored the SAM Coupé Adventure Club disk #1, and stumbled into playing… sigh… Behind Closed Doors.
We also try to apologize to Amstrad PCW enthusiasts and probably have made some SAM Coupé types upset as well.
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Actual footage of Ben Collier playing Behind Closed Doors:
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Some misguided individual has had a go at porting Behind Closed Doors to the BBC Micro here. Probably had too much time on his hands.
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As a SAM Coupé owner, both now and back in the day when it originally came out… as well as the reviews editor of The Sam Adventure Club magazine… I thought I should probably give the first section of this a listen to and respond as appropriate! 
Yes, the SAM was probably about as bad an idea as the C65was … although I loved it at the time and it’s certainly paid off in monetary value for anyone who kept hold of either of those machines!
With the lack of very little real, significant professionally-released commercial software, it was down to us SAM owners to produce games and utilities for the little wedge-shaped micro. As you suspected, there was a whole collection of different SAM disk (and paper) magazines out there and throughout the history of the SCAC disk we used various different “article” viewers, many of which were shared between the various magazines.
One of the advantages of producing a disk magazine was the fact we could give away games on the disk. These were all fully-licensed from the homegrown publishers of the day, such as Zenobi, Compass and The Guild, and were mostly ZX Spectrum games. Even as a SAM owner I would find getting them to load on real hardware today hard but anyone who was a SAM owner at the time knew exactly how to load Spectrum games into their SAMs and had the required emulators to hand; usually with a copy of the Spectrum ROM to load in to ensure maximum compatibility.
As time went on we included more of the actual tools on the disk so the games could be launched from the menus directly and even developed routines that would work with ZX Spectrum games to allow them to access elements of the SAM itself; such as allowing to users to change fonts & colours on the fly, save to disk, and even (in cases such as The Hermitage) load in additional graphics to display alongside the game.
It wasn’t all about ZX Spectrum games, though… the SAM did have its own small range of specific text adventures. Colin Jordan’s The Famous Five was perhaps the most well-known of these (I actually didn’t play it myself!) and he also developed the sadly underutilised Sam Adventure System. SAM had a unlicensed version of CP/M called ProDOS which allowed a whole world of text adventures, including Infocom’s, to be played on the machine.
As for poor Behind Closed Doors! The game was originally a free B-side on the back of John’s other releases, so probably should be viewed in that manner! It did become incredibly popular though, largely due to its inclusion on some commercial magazine covertapes. For many Speccy arcade gamers it was the only ZX Spectrum text adventure they ever played and is very fondly remembered… usually for its responses to random comments. I can understand how it would appear to a modern audience, though. John’s games were always a little obtuse in places, especially with the restrictions of the two word and four character parser of the Quill, but players at the time were probably more attuned to his idiosyncrasies.
Although I’d recommend loading the SCAC disks into Sim Coupe to view them; if people want to nose at the contents, without emulation, I’ve popped up the text from the first two issues here (Sam Adventure Club - Issue 1), here (Sam Adventure Club - Issue 2) and here ( Sam Adventure Club - Issue 3).
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I’ve added the browser-readable link to SCAC #1 to the show notes, we’ll keep it in mind when we go back to the series. And thank you for the other historical context! Running the image definitely felt like a thing that users would more-or-less easily know how to do but seems obtuse to an outsider.
Thank you for the trip down memory lane - I played Monsters of Murdac (on a real Amstrad PCW but no hard feelings) as teenager. I never did complete the game but I had fun with the wacky environment despite feeling that the first puzzle (where you have to make 4 specific actions right from the first turn of the game) was very unfair. I think your supposition that it was designed to be solved by a group of people in a computer lab is right on the money.
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