Brimstone (computer game)
| Brimstone | |
|---|---|
| Studio | Synapse software |
| Publisher | Brøderbund |
| Senior Developer | James Paul |
| Erstveröffent- lichung |
1985 |
| platform | Apple II , Atari 8-Bit , Atari ST , C64 , MS-DOS |
| Game engine | BTZ |
| genre | Text adventure |
| control | keyboard |
| medium | diskette |
| language | English |
| copy protection | Enclosure referencing |
Brimstone (German: Schwefel ), also Brimstone: The Dream of Gawain , is a text adventure that was developed by Synapse Software in 1985 and published by Brøderbund for various home computers and DOS computers.
action
Brimstone is set in medieval Britain at the time of the Arthurian legend and takes up some of its characters. The framework is the "Eve of All Hallows", the evening before All Saints' Day, when the knights of the round table indulge in idleness. The actual game action takes place on a meta level in the form of a dream by Sir Gawain. He finds himself trapped in the world of Ulro and must learn five magic words in order to defeat his nemesis , the Green Knight, and to escape Ulro.
Game principle and technology
Brimstone 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 . The lower fifth of the screen is used to enter commands and the parser's reactions to them, the upper 80% are reserved for the representation of the environment and what is happening. Brimstone is one of the few text adventures that play in real time - if the player does not make an entry, the game continues anyway. The game is divided into five chapters - one for each magic word to be found - which must be played one after the other and which each have a different setting thematically.
Production notes
The game was marketed as an “electronic novel” in order to distinguish itself from the often technically simple text adventures of the early 1980s and to create a proximity to the high-quality products of the Infocom company . Like its predecessor Mindwheel and Essex, which appeared at the same time, Brimstone uses the BTZ engine ("Better Than Zork "), which was developed by the programmers Cathryn Mataga (then William Mataga) and Steve Hales . Like Mindwheel , Brimstone was written by a writer who had no previous contact with the video game industry: James Paul wrote for the Washington Post in 1985 and was considered an aspiring poet and is now a lecturer in creative writing at Hunter College . The texts of the game are written in the third person, which is unusual for text adventures mostly held in the second and occasionally in the first person. The game was accompanied by a 120-page novella written by Paul , which introduced the game world and served as copy protection.
Brimstone was programmed by David Bunch, Mataga and Bill Darrah. Bunch was later responsible for Electronic Arts as technical director for games such as Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2001 or Battlefield Vietnam . Mataga, who was successful with Shamus for the first time , had already programmed Mindwheel and Essex and was later responsible for titles such as Grand Theft Auto Advance and various versions of animated films from Disney and Marvel Comics as a senior programmer at Digital Eclipse , and worked for Stormfront Studios on Neverwinter Nights . Darrah, who not only programmed Essex , but also wrote Essex , was later only noticed by the Atari ST version of Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders .
reception
Jimmy Maher, author of the interactive fiction standard work Let's Tell A Story Together , pointed out in his blog “The Digital Antiquarian” that Brimstone was not following a stringent plot, but rather a surreal journey through a medieval dream world full of allusions to literary works be; so he shows echoes of Dante's Divine Comedy , Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress , Genesis 1 and Kafka's The Trial . He attested Brimstone to have a “remote, dreamlike mood”, but criticized the sometimes obscure puzzles that, in his opinion, were primarily built in to artificially lengthen the playing time. Neill Randall, game designer and English assistant professor at Waterloo University, described Brimstone as "the most literary work of interactive fiction" and "perhaps the most literary of all contemporary IF works". The American Compute! -Magazine saw Brimstone as a medieval chivalric romance in the style of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight , but set in a world of its own, inspired by the works of Dante Alighieri and William Blake . The magazine criticized the long loading times of the C64 version, but rated Brimstone overall as “excellent literature” and as the best game from Brøderbund's electronic novel series. The constant disk accesses were also criticized by the CGW as "desperate".
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Washington Post, February 23, 1986: Oakland. Retrieved May 6, 2016 .
- ^ A b The Digital Aquarian: Essex and Brimstone. Retrieved May 6, 2016 .
- ^ Neill Randall: Determining Literariness in Interactive Fiction . In: Computers and the Humanities 22 (1988), p. 187
- ↑ Compute # 77, Oct 1986, p. 66: Brimstone. Retrieved May 8, 2016 .
- ↑ CGW # 25, January 1986, p. 16: The Year in Review. Retrieved May 8, 2016 .