Cromwell House
| Cromwell House | |
|---|---|
| Studio | Axis computer art |
| Publisher | Ariolasoft |
| Senior Developer | Jürgen Römer |
| Erstveröffent- lichung |
1985 |
| platform | Atari 8-bit , Commodore 64 |
| genre | Text adventure |
| medium | diskette |
| language | German |
Cromwell House (also Cromwell House ) is a computer game of the text adventure genre that was developed in 1985 by the German developer Axis Komputerkunst for the 8-bit home computers of Atari and Commodore 64 and published by the publisher Ariolasoft .
action
Cromwell House is set in a fictional mansion in Oxford, UK . The player takes on the role of an agent for Scotland Yard . Mrs. Twaddleby, a neighbor of Lord Henry Horatio Higginbottom, reports they heard a gunshot on his property, and the player goes to Higginbottom's mansion to check the details and quickly finds his body. At first glance, it seems as if the host committed suicide, but a little later there are indications that suggest a murder. Three people were in the house at the time of the crime and are therefore possible perpetrators: Higginbottom's 19-year-old wife, the butler and the housekeeper. If the player has found sufficient evidence to be arrested, he should close the case by calling Scotland Yard. As the game progresses, it turns out that Higginbottom's wife had an affair with the butler and wanted to run away with him, but had nothing to do with the murder - it was committed by the housekeeper who blamed Higginbottom for the death of her son .
Game principle and technology
Cromwell House is a text adventure, which means that surroundings 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, additional locations in the game world, which includes around 50 locations, will be activated. Cromwell House has German texts and a German-language parser, which was a rarity for commercial text adventures at the time because of the limited sales market and the more complex grammar compared to English. In terms of quality, however, the parser lagged significantly behind the products of successful Anglo-American companies: While Cromwell House could only process commands consisting of two words in the object-verb format (e.g. "open door" or "examine fence") and thereby round Understood 100 words, the parser of the English-language game Wishbringer by the US company Infocom , which was released in the same year, understood whole sentences and over 1000 words.
Production notes
The author of the game was the Hamburg journalist Jürgen Römer, who was a full-time editor of a television magazine and was responsible for the computer section. Through colleagues who were also enthusiastic about computers, he came into contact with the author collective Axis Komputerkunst. He presented a test version of the game there, which led to a contract between Römer and Axis. Römer wrote Cromwell House for the most part alone, Axis took care of technical support and marketing. Römer used the BASIC programming language integrated in his Commodore 64 to create the game, which was then converted into faster executable machine language by a compiler . Römer had consciously decided against the use of illustrative graphics, although the products of companies such as Level 9 or Telarium already had them. Römer did not consider the graphics quality of the C64 or the space on its contemporary storage media to be sufficient to adequately illustrate the game. Only a cover picture was added to the game.
Unusually for the industry, the packaging was modeled on a record cover and had to be labeled as software with a sticker attached to prevent misunderstandings. The packaging included blueprints for the four-story villa as well as photos of the crime scene and other evidence in Polaroid format to deepen the immersion . On the packaging, publisher Ariolasoft called the game differently as "Cromwell House". In the game itself, however, the spelling "Cromwell House" is used without a hyphen.
Cromwell House sold well for a German-language text adventure; In the first eight months after publication, at least 6000 units were sold at a sales price of 79 DM .
Only a little later, Römer developed a second text adventure for Axis Komputerkunst with Mord auf Bord , which Ariolasoft began selling in 1986. Another game, also a crime thriller, did not get beyond the conception phase because Römer was too busy with his main job.
reception
The computer contact saw in Cromwell House a "very tricky case" and praised the detailed descriptions and dry English humor of the game. The sparse parser and the cumbersome entry of long German words without the possibility of abbreviations were criticized. Overall, the magazine rated Cromwell House as "recommended". In a retrospective, the German trade magazine The Parser noted the game's primitive parser, which was common for German-language text adventures at the time, but praised the game's texts, which are atmospheric and “nevertheless capture the crime genre with an ironic wink”.
Web links
- Cromwell House in the Interactive Fiction Database (IFDB)
- Cromwell House in the C64 Wiki
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c Ingo Scharmann: Cromwell House . In: The Parser . No. 2, November 2010, p. 16. (PDF, 5 MB)
- ^ Resonant.org: Wishbringer. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on May 6, 2018 ; accessed on June 3, 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.
- ↑ The professional players . In: My home computer . April 1986, p. 92.
- ↑ Ingo Scharmann: An interview with Jürgen Römer . In: The Parser . No. 2, November 2010, p. 17. (PDF, 5 MB)
- ↑ Peter Finzel: Axis gets started . In: Computer contact . February 1986, p. 58.
