Thorin sings about gold
Posted: 2008-11-14
There’s a little slice of gaming pie that I will always remember with fondness, that slice that kept me enthralled and produced so many good games that it was hard to keep track of them all. Of course there were some titles that didn’t quite do the genre justice and then there were the true undisputed kings. With the advent of text adventures I was drawn into the heady worlds of imagination that were built upon a complex series of puzzles that usually meant that you were one word away from complete frustration.
Adventure gaming in general is a dying light in the electronic game industry, with bigger and better PC’s containing the latest in cutting-edge hardware becoming cheaper by the month developers are using their technological know-how to create 3d spectacles that blind the eyes with tonnes of bloom lightning and visual whiz-bang whilst the old gits like myself remember with some kind of growing fondness the first few text based games that must have been the foundation for such ideas as World of Warcraft. I’ll come back to that point later on.
I mean, the Zork series and the Hobbit along with the Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy were some of my first tastes of text-based adventure gaming. From then on in I was hooked, these things were often fiendish experiments in frustration that ended with a simple answer or in the case of the Hobbit, Thorin, singing about gold for a few hours as you tried to work out how the hell to get past a particular type of puzzle. Many of them made good use of puns in their design and most had no graphics to speak of in the early days.
As time wore on it became apparent that people weren’t going to be satisfied with just the basic text-adventure and they wanted a little more. So along with the text descriptions there were options for a crude black and white image either in ASCII or as we progressed up the graphical ladder, pixel art. Eventually we got crude colour and then simple animations, these were usually switched 1,0 affairs like a two-colour graphical lamp that cycled on and off to give the impression of a flickering flame.
The text adventures became more complex and developed a vast community of gamers who weren’t satisfied with just a simple key to open a door, they sprawled into massive epic stories and began to morph towards such curious tales as Mike Singleton’s: Lords of Midnight that kept me up till all hours of the morning with its fiendishly addictive gameplay at the time. On the ZX-Spectrum, this had rudimentary animation and scene-setting graphics along with a strong narrative and Tolkien-esque characters.
Now we move forwards to the Commodore 64 and a little game called Manic Mansion, in 1987. Aric Wilmunder and Ron Gibert coded a system that would revolutionise the adventure game genre and open the door to extremely complex systems. I’m talking of course of the SCUMM engine; I’m not going to go into what SCUMM means unless you really want me to. Ok, you twisted my arm! SCUMM stands for: Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion
Armed with this knowledge you can now go forth and wow all of your friends, be a hit at parties and get the girl, kill the baddy and save the entire planet. This cunningly brings me around to the next point about SCUMM, it has numerous versions and I think at the last count it went up to 10 with Lucasfilm Games (Now LucasArts) and Ron’s own company Humungous Entertainment took it to around version 11. It powered some incredibly great games, such as LOOM and my all time favourite Lucas game: Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. This was one of the first games to feature Lucas’ iMUSE technology that synchronised the game music with the on screen action.
Regardless of the game technology behind the actual scenes, these games were now much more than just a screen of text. They featured animated sprite based characters and hand drawn backgrounds. Full Throttle slipped in some rudimentary mini-game sequences in amongst the adventure gaming and games such as the Dig and Day of the Tentacle pushed the storytelling (and humour) envelopes forcing many other developers to re-think many of their strategies. The true Golden Age of Point and Click Adventure gaming had arrived and back then, it was a good time to be an adventure game fanatic.
Adventure gaming in general is a dying light in the electronic game industry, with bigger and better PC’s containing the latest in cutting-edge hardware becoming cheaper by the month developers are using their technological know-how to create 3d spectacles that blind the eyes with tonnes of bloom lightning and visual whiz-bang whilst the old gits like myself remember with some kind of growing fondness the first few text based games that must have been the foundation for such ideas as World of Warcraft. I’ll come back to that point later on.
I mean, the Zork series and the Hobbit along with the Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy were some of my first tastes of text-based adventure gaming. From then on in I was hooked, these things were often fiendish experiments in frustration that ended with a simple answer or in the case of the Hobbit, Thorin, singing about gold for a few hours as you tried to work out how the hell to get past a particular type of puzzle. Many of them made good use of puns in their design and most had no graphics to speak of in the early days.
As time wore on it became apparent that people weren’t going to be satisfied with just the basic text-adventure and they wanted a little more. So along with the text descriptions there were options for a crude black and white image either in ASCII or as we progressed up the graphical ladder, pixel art. Eventually we got crude colour and then simple animations, these were usually switched 1,0 affairs like a two-colour graphical lamp that cycled on and off to give the impression of a flickering flame.
The text adventures became more complex and developed a vast community of gamers who weren’t satisfied with just a simple key to open a door, they sprawled into massive epic stories and began to morph towards such curious tales as Mike Singleton’s: Lords of Midnight that kept me up till all hours of the morning with its fiendishly addictive gameplay at the time. On the ZX-Spectrum, this had rudimentary animation and scene-setting graphics along with a strong narrative and Tolkien-esque characters.
Now we move forwards to the Commodore 64 and a little game called Manic Mansion, in 1987. Aric Wilmunder and Ron Gibert coded a system that would revolutionise the adventure game genre and open the door to extremely complex systems. I’m talking of course of the SCUMM engine; I’m not going to go into what SCUMM means unless you really want me to. Ok, you twisted my arm! SCUMM stands for: Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion
Armed with this knowledge you can now go forth and wow all of your friends, be a hit at parties and get the girl, kill the baddy and save the entire planet. This cunningly brings me around to the next point about SCUMM, it has numerous versions and I think at the last count it went up to 10 with Lucasfilm Games (Now LucasArts) and Ron’s own company Humungous Entertainment took it to around version 11. It powered some incredibly great games, such as LOOM and my all time favourite Lucas game: Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. This was one of the first games to feature Lucas’ iMUSE technology that synchronised the game music with the on screen action.
Regardless of the game technology behind the actual scenes, these games were now much more than just a screen of text. They featured animated sprite based characters and hand drawn backgrounds. Full Throttle slipped in some rudimentary mini-game sequences in amongst the adventure gaming and games such as the Dig and Day of the Tentacle pushed the storytelling (and humour) envelopes forcing many other developers to re-think many of their strategies. The true Golden Age of Point and Click Adventure gaming had arrived and back then, it was a good time to be an adventure game fanatic.
