Breakers

Breakers
Studio	Synapse software
Publisher	Brøderbund
Senior Developer	Rodney Smith
Erstveröffent- lichung	1986
platform	Apple II , Atari ST , Commodore 64 , MS-DOS
Game engine	BTZ
genre	Text adventure
medium	diskette
language	English
copy protection	Enclosure referencing

Breakers is a science fiction - text adventure , which in 1986 by the US studio Synapse Software develops and the publisher Brøderbund for various home computers and DOS was published calculator.

action

The planet Borg is threatened with a cosmic catastrophe in the form of a collision with a mysterious twin planet that cannot be detected by scientific methods. The collision occurs at regular, long intervals and represents a kind of cleansing of the planet for the inhabitants of the planet, the peaceful, telepathically gifted Lau. In order for the Lau to survive the collision, they must perform a ritual that has been handed down to an initiated group and requires multiple artifacts called "elements". The seven Lau who are supposed to perform the ritual are ambushed by Breakers, intergalactic smugglers whose headquarters are in an inaccessible area on Borg and who conduct their business via a technically obsolete trading space station in orbit around Borg, operated by the United Mining Combine company . The Breakers kill six of the seven Lau, but are then surprised by a task force of the "Gaks", the security forces of the United Mining Combine. In the course of the fighting, the surviving Seventh Lau loses consciousness and awakens on the space station in orbit. There he is mistaken for a breaker by the gaks; the Breakers isolated on the ward also consider him one of their own. From this point on, the player takes on the role of the seventh Lau. He must first familiarize himself with the social fabric of the residents of the space station, take sides in a dispute between enemy smugglers and uncover cases of drug and human trafficking. The player also has to deal with the question of why United Mining Combine operates the space station in the orbit of Borg, sometimes with high secrecy, even though all raw material deposits there have already been exploited. The ultimate goal of the game is to recover the "elements", to get back to the planet Borg and to successfully carry out the ritual there.

Game principle and technology

Game scene

Breakers is a text adventure, which means that the environment and events are displayed as screen text and the visualization is largely up to the player's imagination. The character is controlled via commands that the player enters using the keyboard and that are processed by a parser . The commands are in natural language and allow the game character to interact with his environment. The player can move through the game world, find objects, apply them to the environment or other objects and communicate with NPCs . As the story progresses, more locations in the game world will be unlocked.

Like its predecessors Brimstone , Essex and Mindwheel, Breakers uses the BTZ engine ("Better Than Zork "), which was developed by programmers William Mataga and Steve Hales . A key figure for the quality of a parser is the number of words understood. The Breakers parser understands around 1200 words, almost twice as many as the game Zork from rival developer Infocom . However, Zork appeared as early as 1980, while the parser of Trinity , published by Infocom around the same time as Breakers , understood over 2100 words. Brøderbund advertised that Breakers was a real-time game where things happened even when the player didn't make any input. In contrast to Trinity , in which the plot developed without any action on the part of the player, Breakers merely simulated a real-time environment in which text describing the atmosphere was output independently of inputs from the player, without the plot progressing.

Production notes

Synapse Software, formerly an independent game developer, was after financial difficulties since 1984 only a studio of Brøderbund. The Synapse text adventures were marketed by the publisher as "electronic novels" (German for example: digital novel) in order to distinguish themselves from the often technically simple text adventures of the early 1980s and to establish a proximity to the high-quality products from Infocom. Brøderbund jumped on a short-lived trend called "Bookware", the synthesis of analogue books and computer games that was postulated in 1979 and between 1984 and 1986 numerous text adventures with literary references such as Amnesia , Dragonriders of Pern , The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy , The Saga of Erik the Viking or the previous Synapse games. In 1986 the trend had already subsided, so that Brøderbund no longer emphasized the term "electronic novel" when marketing Breakers . The title differed from its predecessors in that it was not based on the work of a well-known author, but was rewritten by author Rodney Smith. Smith, an acquaintance of several Synapse employees, wrote a 40-page novella about the game, which was included in the game's packaging in printed form. The novella served the immersion in the game world, but also represented the copy protection of the game by asking for a word from the novella at the beginning.

The media coverage of the game was low and the sales figures were disappointing. Synapse had been working on another "electronic novel" at the same time, the samurai adventure Ronin . This was completed at the end of 1986, and two more text adventures were in the works. However, after Breakers, publisher Brøderbund was no longer interested in the “bookware” genre. Ronin , like the other two games, remained unreleased, and the Synapse Software studio was closed by owner Brøderbund.

reception

The US computer game magazine Computist stated that Breakers offers a difficult introduction with its “labyrinthine” plot, but that it is fun thanks to the successful parser, communicative NPCs and an easier writing style compared to the previous games. The magazine awarded 7 out of 10 points. The trade magazine Questbusters emphasized the high level of difficulty of the game. It praised the story of the game, a successful mix of object- and communication-related puzzles and Smith's independent, humorous writing style. The parser was noted negatively, which, in contrast to the parsers of competing companies, did not improve from game to game, but two years after its development still required precise input instead of analyzing intuitive player behavior. The parser is only sufficiently intelligent when communicating with NPCs. Editor Shay Addams criticized the copy protection query, which he thought was too frequent, as "annoying". The Ludo historian Jimmy Maher describes Breakers as the largest, most complex and most difficult of Synapse's four "electronic novels". He pointed out that it is an unusual scenario for both science fiction and text adventures to have a story told from the perspective of an alien. Maher praised the game for being "literarily ambitious" and for having a complex plot, and for Smith succeeding in depicting the lively microcosm of the space station from an unusual perspective. He criticized, however, that the ambition of the game to focus on communicating with NPCs in the puzzles failed because of the unsuitable parser. Neil Randall, English professor at the University of Waterloo and head of the Games Institute there, analyzed Breakers for its literary content and saw the introduction of the game as an "allusive, thought-provoking (...) invitation to create science fiction myths" which does not present the player with a chain of puzzles that would frustrate him in the long run, as in other games, but describes rituals that formed the foundation of the science fiction genre and gave the player an immersive insight into the myths of a fictional people. Graham Nelson , inventor of Interactive fiction programming language Inform , called Breakers as a "story about Indenturarbeit ", remember the technique of communication with NPCs in interrogations.

Web links

• Breakers at MobyGames (English)
• Breakers in the Interactive Fiction Database (IFDB)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Shay Addams: Breakers: Borg under a Bad Sign . In: Questbusters . Vol. 3, No. 9, September 1986, p. 1.
2. ↑ ^{a b} Breakers . In: Computist . No. 41, March 1987, p. 24.
3. ↑ ^{a b} MOCAGH.org: Breakers Manual. Retrieved April 21, 2018 .  (PDF, 19.5 MB)
4. ^ Resonant.org: Zork I: The Great Underground Empire. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on May 6, 2018 ; accessed on April 21, 2018 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
5. ^ Resonant.org: Trinity. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on May 6, 2018 ; accessed on April 21, 2018 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
6. ↑ Filfre.net: Bookware. Retrieved April 21, 2018 . 
7. ↑ ^{a b c} Filfre.net: Bookware's Sunset. Retrieved April 21, 2018 . 
8. ^ Neil Randall: Determining Literariness in Interactive Fiction . In: Computers and the Humanities . No. 22, 1988, p. 186.
9. ^ Graham Nelson: The Inform Designer's Manual . The Interactive Fiction Library, St. Charles 2001, ISBN 978-0-9713119-0-9 , pp. 356 .