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Archive-name: games/interactive-fiction/part3
URL: http://bang.dhs.org/faq/ Maintainer: Stephen van Egmond <svanegmond@home.com> Version: 1.6 - December 2000 See reader questions & answers on this topic! - Help others by sharing your knowledge
Now, let's take a look here... Well, you probably deserve another chance.
I can't quite fi-
You go dizzy for a few seconds
then your head clears again.
(3.1) Beyond Infocom
This is part 3 of the Frequently Asked Questions list for the group
rec.games.int-fiction, a Usenet newsgroup for the discussion of
Interactive Fiction games and related topics. To read a specific
question, use your newsreader's search function on the string "(n)",
where n is the question number.
Contents of this file:
(3.1) Beyond Infocom
(3.2) Infocom wasn't the only adventure game company, you know.
(3.3) Level 9 Software
(3.4) Topologika Software
(3.5) 'Who is Scott Adams?'
(3.6) Want some games for that ZX Spectrum?
(3.7) The ongoing development of interactive fiction.
The current maintainer is Stephen van Egmond. Questions and information
should be mailed to mailto:svanegmond@tinyplanet.ca. The most recent
version is at http://bang.dhs.org/faq/
Part 1 covers the elements of rec.games.int-fiction. Part 2 covers
Infocom.
You are in an amphitheater. The sound of the crowd comes from all around.
There is a gladiator here, holding a weapon and advancing toward you. The
gladiator says:
(3.2) Infocom wasn't the only adventure game company, you know.
There were (and are) numerous other companies dedicated to the
production of interactive fiction games.
Level 9, Adventure International ("Scott Adams"), Topologika, Magnetic
Scrolls, and Penguin software seem to have a noticeable following on
rec.games.int-fiction. If you have a personal favourite, ask about it,
and someone will probably know. Feel free to contribute some FAQ
questions to the maintainer: mailto:svanegmond@home.com.
The gladiator advances menacingly.
> ASK THE GLADIATOR ABOUT LEVEL 9
(3.3) Level 9 Software
Level 9 was formed by three brothers (Pete, Mike and Nick Austin) in
1982. Their first product was a port of Adventure to the 8-bit computers
that dominated the English market at the time. Until they left the text
adventure business in 1990, they produced over a dozen adventure games
for the 8-bit computers (the Spectrum, C64, BBC B and Atari 800
machines). From 1986 their games also appeared for the Amiga, Atari ST
and IBM PC computers.
Level 9 used a custom adventure writing system referred to as "A-Code".
This allowed a high degree of compression: a typical game of 210
locations, 70 objects, and lots of text could fit into 32K. The
adventure engine had 5 major versions:
* Basic Text: black on white with noun/verb parser
* Advanced Text: yellow on black with faster display
* Basic Graphics: simple line drawings for each location, at a cost to
the amount of text in the game
* Advanced Graphics: dramatically improved parser and the usual amount
of text.
* Interactive Characters: grid-like maps, digitized graphics, and
improved parser with interactive, independent characters.
Each game was available in three versions for the Sinclair Spectrum: 48K
all-text, 48K graphics with reduced text, and 128K graphics with full
text, multiple UNDO and save/restore in RAM. For the final games the
digitized graphics were only available on the Amiga, Atari ST, PC and
C64 disk versions.
Several of Level 9's games formed trilogies, and were repackaged as such
in the late 1980s. In approximate chronological order, then:
These three were later packaged into a Middle Earth Trilogy (renamed by
the lawyers to Colossal Trilogy). In 1986 the package was released
again, this time with graphics, a nicer parser and some text tweaks, and
renamed The Jewels of Darkness.
* Colossal Adventure, Essentially a conversion of Crowther and Woods'
classic mainframe text adventure. The Austins expanded the end game
somewhat.
* Adventure Quest, A game very much in the mould of the original
Adventure. The ultimate object is to defeat the Demon Lord.
* Dungeon Adventure, This game follows on directly from Adventure
Quest. After defeating the Demon Lord you must now loot his tower.
The following three were packaged as the Silicon Dreams Trilogy:
* Snowball (1982?), Considered by many as Level 9's best game. As Kim
Kimberley, colonist on the spaceship Snowball 9, you must defeat the
hijacker who has taken control of the ship. Famous for advertising
itself as having 2 million locations (though rather a large number
of these were very similar).
* Return to Eden (1984), The direct sequel to Snowball. After rescuing
Snowball 9, you are accused of being the hijacker and are sentenced
to death. You must escape the authorities and stop the robots on
Eden destroying the Snowball.
* Worm in Paradise (1986), A rather darker game, set 100 years after
Snowball and Return to Eden. The colony of Eden has become a corrupt
dystopia, in which you are a lowly worker.
The following three games were re-released as the Time and Magik
trilogy.
* Lords of Time (1982?), A time-travel adventure, set in nine separate
time zones. The Timelords have meddled with history, and can only be
stopped if a specific item is recovered from each zone.
* Red Moon (1985), Level 9's first use of magic in their games. In a
parallel universe, the Red Moon crystal, the sole source of magic,
has been stolen. You must recover it...
* The Price of Magik (1986) The Red Moon crystal has again been
stolen, and must be recovered from the mansion of the magician
Myglar. A gothic horror story.
The following games were not part of a trilogy:
* Eric the Viking (1984), A comedy adventure based on the film of the
same name.
* Emerald Isle (1985), You are a paratrooper stranded on an enemy
island from which you must escape.
Level 9 (in association with Mandarin) also produced several multiple
choice adventure games. The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole was based on the
Adrian Mole children's books popular in England in the 1980s, and The
Archers was based on the English radio show of the same name.
In 1986, Level 9 upgraded their adventure writing system to allow
independent non-player characters in their stories, and bitmapped
graphics. These games were first released for the Atari ST, Amiga and
PC, with later conversions to the C64 and Spectrum. Due to the size of
these games they were all split into 3 parts, each one only playable
after completing the previous section.
* Knight Orc (1987), For a change the player gets to be an Orc, who
has to avoid bloodthirsty humans. Notable for a particularly good
parody of inane MUD players.
* Gnome Ranger (1987), Another Level 9 game with the player as a
non-human protagonist. This time the player is Ingrid, a not very
likeable gnome. Ingrid must find her way back home. Contains a large
number of enjoyably bad "gnome" jokes, as in "Exits lead gnorth,
gnortheast,..."
* Lancelot (1988), As its name and subtitle "The Quest for the Holy
Grail" implies, this is an adventure set in the world of Arthurian
legend.
* Ingrid's Back: Gnome Ranger 2 (1988), The sequel to Gnome Ranger,
with the player once again being Ingrid. This time Ingrid must same
her village of Little Moaning from being demolished by evil property
developers.
* Scapeghost (1989), A game with an unusual premise, as it begins at
your funeral. You were a police officer, betrayed by one of your
colleagues to the drugs gang you and your partner were infiltrating.
Now your partner is the gang's hostage and the police believe that
it was all your fault. The aim is to rescue your partner and clear
your name. A rather sombre game, as befits Level 9's final text
adventure.
The gladiator advances menacingly!
> ASK THE GLADIATOR ABOUT TOPOLOGIKA
(3.4) Topologika Software
Perhaps the first adventure game written outside the U.S. was "Acheton"
(c. 1979), by Jon Thackray and David Seal, with contributions by
Jonathan Partington, working in the mathematics department of Cambridge
University, England. "Acheton" is an enormous cave game, whose name is a
confection of "Acheron" (the river that dead used to cross in order to
get to Hades) and "Achates" (minor character in Virgil's "Aeneid"),
based around exploration and collecting treasures.
Thackray and Seal devised one of the earliest adventure-design systems
(which although basically an assembler was influential on for instance
the modern design system "Inform") and it was publically used on the
Cambridge IBM mainframe ("Phoenix") until the mid-1990s.
Acornsoft, then the software arm of Acorn Computers Ltd., also based in
Cambridge and with strong links to the university, published a
conversion of "Acheton" to the BBC Micro, on two 100K floppy discs (one
containing the game, one containing hints). "Kingdom of Hamil" and other
games followed.
The rights in these games are now held by Topologika Software (Waterside
House, Falmouth Road, Penryn, Cornwall TR10 8BE; email:
sales@topolgka.demon.co.uk), now better known as an educational software
house. They are not being sold anymore, but are freely available from
the if-archive, thanks to the work of Adam Atkinson, P. David Doherty
and Gunther Schmidl. See
ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/phoenix/games/pc/
* Acheton (JT, DS) fantasy
* Countdown to Doom (PK) SF
* Return to Doom (PK) SF
* Last Days of Doom (PK) SF
* Hezarin (ST, AS, JT) fantasy
* Avon (JT, JP) Shakespearian satire
* Murdac (JT, JP) fantasy
* Philosopher's Quest (PK) puzzle
* SpySnatcher (JP, JT, PK) espionage satire
JT = Jon Thackray; DS = David Seal; PK = Peter Killworth; JP = Jonathan
Partington; ST = Steve Tinney; AS = Alex Shipp
These all sell for 15 pounds sterling regardless of format, plus 1 pound
P&P, except that Last Days of Doom/Hezarin and Avon/Murdac are sold as
double-packs at 20 pounds; under RISC OS only, so is Acheton/Hamil; and,
under RISC OS only, Countdown to Doom/Return to Doom/Phil. Quest as a
triple at 30.
The gladiator advances menacingly!
> ASK THE GLADIATOR ABOUT SCOTT ADAMS
(3.5) 'Who is Scott Adams?'
"Mr. Adams was never in the business of writing the Scott Adams
adventure games."
- The Dilbert FAQ by Dogbert
Adventure International is a company founded by Scott Adams, whose games
used a datafile and interpreter system similar to that of Infocom. There
is a freely distributable interpreter, Scottfree, on ftp.ifarchive.org.
There were interpreters released for a large number of 8-bit machines,
like the TRS-80, Apple II, Atari 400/800, and Commodore's 8-bit lineup.
The adventures were written using a noun/verb parser, but are considered
to have exciting story lines. I still remember playing the cartridge
version of "Impossible Mission" on my friend's VIC-20.
Adventure International released several lines of games using the same
datafile format and various interpreter revisions.
The Scott Adams Classic Adventure Series:
* Adventure Land: Ordinary treasure hunting.
* Pirate Adventure / Pirate's Cove: Search an island.
* Mission Impossible / Secret Mission / Impossible Mission: Stop the
reactor from going kaboom.
* There was also Voodoo Castle, The Count, Strange Odyssey, Fun House
Mystery, Pyramid of Doom, Ghost Town, Savage Island parts 1 and 2,
Golden Voyage, Sorcerer of Claymorgue Castle, and Adventures of
Buckaroo Bonzai.
Questprobe Series: The adventures in this series feature characters from
Marvel Comics. The adventures were named The Hulk, Spiderman, and
Fantastic Four. The latter used a different adventure engine to allow
control of two different characters.
There was a separate line of games sold by Adventure International using
a different datafile format: Curse of Crowley Manor, Escape from Traam,
San Francisco 1906, and Saigon: The Final Days.
Other games include Labyrinth of Crete, Return to Pirate's Island, Stone
of Sisyphus, and Morton's fork.
In the UK, there were many companies related to Adventure International,
such as Horrorsoft, Tynesoft, Adventure Soft UK, and Adventure
International UK. More information can be found in Adventure Game
History, by Hans Persson, from whose work all of the above comes.
Scott Adams is on the Net and passes through rec.*.int-fiction from time
to time. In August 2000, he completed, after a multi-year effort, a new
Windows 95 text adventure called _Return to Pirate's Isle 2_. His home
page -- including a facility for ordering the game -- is at
http://www.msadams.com/.
The gladiator's weapon swishes through the air, narrowly missing you!
> SHOW ZX SPECTRUM TO GLADIATOR
(3.6) Want some games for that ZX Spectrum?
There is an ftp archive of many of the games that were released by Level
9, Adventure Software, Brian Howarth, and some others of unclear origin.
ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/spectrum/
The only common format in which Level 9 games are available is as images
(snapshots) for Sinclair Spectrum emulators. There are many Level 9
games available from the main Spectrum archive in Slovenia, in the
snapshots directory ftp://ftp.ijs.si/pub/zx/snapshots/ The filenames
(e.g. "adquest128k.zip") should adequately explain which games are
which, and for what size of machine they are intended.
There are also several Level 9 snapshots on the IF Archive, in
ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/spectrum/level9.zip
These games can be played with a Spectrum emulator. Emulators for PCs
and Macs can be found at
ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/emulators/spectrum/
These games can also be played with the Level 9 interpreter, written by
Glen Summers. Versions are available for DOS, Windows, Amiga and Acorn
Archimedes. The interpreter is available at
ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/level9/interpreters/level9/ and has
also been integrated into the Mac program MultiAdventures
ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/level9/interpreters/
The interpreter can play all Level 9 games from Colossal Adventure to
Scapeghost, in any data format, provided that it is not compressed. The
interpreter has been tested with Level 9 games taken from Spectrum, C64,
BBC, Atari, Amiga and PC platforms. The only restriction is that the
very earliest format (v1) games do not work. However, all v1 games are
also available in later formats.
In general, Paul David Doherty's "Adventure Page" is the best resource
for information (and copies of) the more obscure adventure games. Refer
to http://www.if-legends.org/~pdd/ for more information on Polarware,
Magnetic Scrolls, Penguin, Level 9, Adventure International, and more.
In fact, the entire site http://www.if-legends.org/ is a great resource
for Interactive Fiction history.
The gladiator swings his sword, remo-
You go dizzy for a few seconds
then your head clears again.
Darkness
It is pitch dark, and you can't see a thing.
> LIGHT
What do you want to light?
> LANTERN
You switch the brass lantern on.
In Debris Room
You are in a debris room filled with stuff washed in from the surface. A
low wide passage with cobbles becomes plugged with mud and debris here,
but an awkward canyon leads upward and west.
A note on the wall says, "Magic word XYZZY."
A three foot black rod with a rusty star on one end lies nearby.
A cheerful little bird is sitting here singing.
> ASK BIRD ABOUT NEW INTERACTIVE FICTION
(3.7) The ongoing development of interactive fiction.
The interactive fiction genre is by no means dead! There is ongoing,
high-quality development efforts taking place right now.
The majority of the public-domain and shareware efforts are in text
adventures, for a number of reasons: the production costs of text are
extremely low, compared to graphical, raytraced, and/or animated
offerings; the authoring tools for text are fairly sophisticated,
accessible, and next to (or precisely) free; and they can usually be
done in a much shorter time.
Games generally are developed around one of either TADS or Inform
development systems, and lately Hugo has been gaining prominence. As
mentioned in part 2, Inform outputs Z-code which can be played by a ZIP,
many of which have source code. TADS and Inform can be played on just
about the same types of computers and operating systems, though Inform's
games may have a slight edge in that they can be played on handheld
devices like Apple Newtons or Psion palmtops. Hugo has not been ported
as widely but is available for the major operating systems (Windows,
Amiga, DOS, Linux), and source is available.
Games like Legend, Curses, the Unnkulia Series, Enhanced, Shades of
Grey, Jigsaw, Christminster, and many more are available, whose quality
rivals that of games released in the 'Golden Age' of text adventures.
These can be found under "games" in the if-archive; some of the busier
games directories, in terms of new arrivals, are
* ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/inform
* ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/tads
* ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/hugo
The annual text adventure competition is a reliable source of
interesting and well-crafted games (there's some lemons, too). These can
be found at
* ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition95/
* ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition96/
* ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition97/
* ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition98/
* ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition99/
* ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2000/
* finally, http://www.ifcompetition.org seems to be the current home
for the competition.
Commercial companies continue to produce adventure-type software;
products like Myst, The Seventh Guest, The 11th Hour, and Return To Zork
are the closest conceptually to IF of the past. Many don't consider
these to be real interactive fiction -- or, consider them inferior IF
works -- since the games don't offer the same richness in details,
variety in actions, or challenge in puzzles as is expected of text IF
today. As a point of note (but by no means policy), Activision's
graphical releases in the "Infocom Universe" like Zork:Nemesis and
Planetfall 2:The Search For Floyd are often discussed on
rec.games.int-fiction, and Myst and "other" graphical IF on the relevant
comp.sys.*.games newsgroups.
There is research going on in areas that could move interactive fiction
forward considerably, in terms of dramatic impact and sophistication.
The Oz Project at Carnegie-Mellon University is researching areas such
as computer simulation of character emotional dynamics, realistic
interactions with the "universe" of the actor, and much more.
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/project/oz/web/oz.html
Further theory can be found in the rec.arts.int-fiction FAQ, at
ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/rec.arts.int-fiction/FAQ
Your lantern flickers slightly, brightens, then suddenly goes out!
> WEST
Oh, no! A lurking grue slithered into the room and devoured you!
**** You have died ****
Press any key to continue
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Stephen van Egmond
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