Amnesia (computer game)
| Amnesia | |
|---|---|
| Studio | Cognetics Corporation |
| Publisher | Electronic Arts |
| Senior Developer | Thomas Michael Disch |
| Erstveröffent- lichung |
1986 |
| platform | Apple II , C64 , DOS |
| Game engine | King Edward Adventure |
| genre | Text adventure |
| control | keyboard |
| medium | diskette |
| language | English |
| copy protection | Feelies, disk check |
Amnesia is a text adventure of Cognetics Corporation , which in 1986 by Electronic Arts was published. The script was written by Thomas Michael Disch .
action
The player wakes up naked and without any memory in a room on the 15th floor of a hotel. As the game begins, it turns out that the player is in Manhattan , engaged to a woman he does not know and is wanted in Texas for murder. A stranger repeatedly tries to kill the player. The player's task is to survive and find memory again.
Gameplay
Amnesia is a text adventure, which means that the environment and events are displayed as text on the screen and the actions of the player are also entered as text via the keyboard. The environment is divided into small sections such as B. an intersection or a shop. There are around 4000 of such locations in the game, which reproduce part of the real Manhattan reasonably well - among other things, 650 real streets and the subway system below are shown. A map of the play area and a notebook with some phone numbers were included with the game. Amnesia also emulates the real time, which may change a. noticeable in the opening times of shops and leads to the fact that the player has to visit certain places at certain times. Furthermore, the player has to take care of his basic needs, including money, food and places to sleep. Depending on the behavior of the player, Amnesia has several final scenes. The parser of the game understands around 1700 words, which makes the game qualitatively catch up with the games from the industry leader Infocom .
Development history
Amnesia is the only text adventure ever published by Electronic Arts, alongside The Hound of Shadow (1989), and was created at a time when text adventures were falling dramatically in popularity. The project manager of the game was Don Daglow . It was programmed by Kevin Bentley in the "King Edward Adventure" programming environment that had been developed by James Terry and was a further development of Forth . Cognetics Corporation was then a manufacturer of educational software; Amnesia was the only computer game the company ever developed. The project was initiated by Disch's publisher Harper & Row , which did not want to miss the mid-1980s trend of converting literature for computers and had a well-known, but at the time commercially relatively unsuccessful author in its portfolio. Harper & Row also moved the Cognetics learning software at that time.
Disch's original manuscript was 450 pages long and had to be greatly shortened in order to adapt it to the limited storage capacity of the hardware of the time. On the basis of the play manuscript, Disch also developed a script for a film, which was never made. Disch's humorous, complex writing style characterizes the texts of the adventure.
reception
Happy Computer praised the sophisticated parser and the humor of the game, but criticized its simplicity and the lack of interactivity in some scenes. Computer Gaming World described the story as "brilliant, witty and captivating". Adventure Classic Gaming found the game had the writing style and character development of a good novel. The partial linearity of the storyline and the lack of a help function were criticized. Reviewer Hamza Ansari classifies the game as an early forerunner of open world games due to its simulation of city life in Manhattan and the player's freedom of exploration . SPAG-Magazin emphasized the high-quality parser and the versatile possibilities for interaction with NPCs , but criticized the cumbersome copy protection, which involved frequent disk changes.
| magazine | Rating | link |
|---|---|---|
| AllGame | 4.5 / 5 | link |
| Happy computer | 80/100 | link |
Web links
- Amnesia at MobyGames (English)
- Company history Cognetics Corporation
Individual evidence
- ↑ Essay on Amnesia on The Digital Antiquarian
- ↑ Computer Gaming World 33, December 1986, p. 24, available online
- ↑ Review on AdventureClassicGaming.com
- ↑ SPAG # 9, June 11, 1996