Adventureland
| Adventureland | |
|---|---|
| Studio | Adventure International |
| Publisher | Adventure International |
| Senior Developer | Scott Adams |
| Erstveröffent- lichung |
1978 |
| platform | Acorn Electron , Apple II , Atari 8-bit , BBC Micro , Commodore 64 , Commodore PET , Commodore VC 20 , Dragon 32/64 , Exidy Sorcerer , IBM-PC , TI-99 / 4A , TRS-80 , ZX Spectrum |
| genre | Text adventure |
| Game mode | Single player |
| control | keyboard |
| medium | Cartridge , floppy disk , cassette |
| language | English |
Adventureland is the first text adventure for home computers . It was developed in 1978 by Scott Adams , who founded Adventure International specifically for this game . Portings for other computers and a version with graphics followed.
action
The player finds himself in a strange fantasy world and is given the task of finding 13 treasures and depositing them in a central location. On his journey he meets a dragon and visits hell.
Game principle and technology
Adventureland is a text adventure, which means that the environment and events are displayed as screen text and the actions of the player are also entered as text via the keyboard and processed by a parser . In some versions, the upper quarter is reserved for the representation of the environment and what is happening, the rest of the screen is used to enter commands and the parser's reactions to them; in the other versions, all text is output sequentially. Versions published later contained rudimentary graphics in the form of hand-drawn still images. The parser had a length of about 120 words, about a sixth of what the grammatically much more complex parser of the earlier Zork could process.
Production notes
Adams was inspired to develop Adventureland by the adventure game , also known as Colossal Cave , which runs on mainframes at his workplace . Although he worked as a programmer and it had access to mainframe computers, he chose his private TRS-80 - home computer as a development platform. The programming language was the BASIC of the TRS-80. Adams did not choose the approach of writing the program code exclusively for the game in progress, but worked directly towards a reusability of the code. For this he developed an interpreter that read game data, created the game world from it and handled the interaction with the player, as well as an editor for game data. With the latter, Adams could u. a. Enter the rooms and objects of the game, but also data for games later developed by him, without having to generate the program code again.
Adams initially sold his program in the form of simple compact cassettes . A little later, he founded Adventure International for marketing and added professional packaging to the cassettes. Adventurland was the first commercially available adventure game. The game was ported to various home computers (e.g. in 1985 by Adventure Soft for the ZX Spectrum ) and sold over 10,000 times in total.
reception
In a retrospective, Ludo historian Jimmy Maher admitted to Adams that he had developed Adventureland, the first adventure game for home computers and also made it a commercial success, but viewed the game from a modern perspective as boring and highly unfair to the player: It If there was no plot, some puzzles were unfair to absurd, the parser and the descriptions of the game world were minimalist, the connections between the rooms of the game world were inconsistent and the player could bring the game into an unsolvable situation in several places, in which the game had to be reloaded, which at that time took 25 minutes on a TRS-80. Nick Montfort, professor of digital media at MIT , quotes reviews in a work on interactive fiction that describe Adventureland (and other Adams games) as "imaginative and full of clever puzzles", but also point to a very careless use of language: Adam's games were full of spelling mistakes and of questionable grammar and were written in a telegraph-like pidgin English.
Web links
- Adventureland at MobyGames (English)
- Adventureland in the Interactive Fiction Database (IFDB)
Individual evidence
- ↑ MobyGames.com: Adventureland Screenshots. Retrieved December 15, 2016 .
- ↑ AdventureClassicGaming.com: Zork I: The Great Underground Empire. Retrieved December 2, 2016 .
- ↑ a b Filfre.net: Adventureland, Part 1. Retrieved November 3, 2018 .
- ↑ Nick Montfort: Twisty Little Passages - An Approach to Interactive Fiction . The MIT Press, Cambridge 2003, ISBN 0-262-13436-5 , pp. 121 .
- ↑ Nick Montfort: Twisty Little Passages - An Approach to Interactive Fiction . The MIT Press, Cambridge 2003, ISBN 0-262-13436-5 , pp. 124 .