Cutthroats
| Cutthroats | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Studio | Infocom |
| Publisher | Infocom |
| Senior Developer | Michael Berlyn , Jerry Wolper |
| Erstveröffent- lichung |
August 9, 1984 |
| platform | Amiga , Apple II , Atari 8-Bit , Atari ST , Commodore 64 , Mac OS , MS-DOS , TRS-80 , TI-99 / 4A |
| Game engine | ZIL |
| genre | adventure |
| Game mode | Single player |
| control | keyboard |
| medium | diskette |
| language | English |
| copy protection | Enclosure referencing |
Cutthroats (German: cutthroat ) is a text adventure from Infocom from the year 1984th
action
The location of the action is Hardscrabble Island, a fictional island whose location is not specified, but which is likely to be on the south coast of the USA or in the Caribbean - the Ludo historian Jimmy Maher locates it on the Treasure Coast in east Florida . Hardscrabble Island used to be a prosperous fishing port, but business declined rapidly in the 1920s, and few die-hard fortune seekers and other dubious characters populate the island by the 1980s, when the game is set.
The player is also a luck seeker and, as a trained diver, looks for treasures from shipwrecks. One night, Hevlin, an old acquaintance of the player, appears who is very excited and asks the player to take a card into safekeeping. A little later, Hevlin is murdered. There are two previously undiscovered shipwrecks on the map, and the player decides to recover any treasures that may be there. He is dependent on the help of the locals, some of whom turn out to be trustworthy, while others do not. The player teams up with three other fortune seekers of questionable trustworthiness: Johnny Red, Pete the Rat, and The Weasel. While the player is organizing equipment for the planned wreck hunt, he has to ward off the attacks of other fortune seekers. The dive trip to the wreck finally threatens to be sabotaged by a crew member who wants to recover the potential treasure on behalf of a rival treasure hunter.
Characters
- Johnny Red
Captain and leader of the adventurers with whom the player conducts the rescue expedition.
- Pete the Rat
Adventurer who takes on the role of ship's cook during the salvage expedition.
- The weasel
Adventurer who worked as a seaman during the salvage expedition and, as the player finds out, secretly collaborates with competitor McGinty.
- McGinty
Owner of the recovery company McGinty Salvage and, as a competitor to the player, the main antagonist of the game.
- Hevlin
A sailor friend who gives the player a map with the positions of two wrecks for safekeeping and who is murdered a little later - presumably because of the map.
Game principle and technology
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Cutthroats is a text adventure , which means there are no graphic elements. Environment and events are displayed as screen text and the player's actions are also entered as text via the keyboard. The player's inputs are processed by a parser , and the results of a move are output as text. The game's parser understands 790 words, which in relation to the number of 68 rooms the game is based on is below average for Infocom standards, but in 1984 it still meant a clear technical lead over the competition. The game contains elements of randomness. B. around Hardscrabble Island two wrecks, the São Vera and the Leviathan , of which only one randomly determined contains the treasure sought. Depending on the wreck selected by the game, the game flow branches out - a novelty in game design theory in 1984 that gave the game a certain replay value. The dynamic character design was also unusual for the time: The computer-controlled NPCs have a life of their own and move independently across the island depending on their current goals or randomly, so that the player may have to search for them or wait for them.
A major factor in the game is time. The game takes place in a kind of real-time in that every move that affects the game world takes one minute. Various processes within the game world depend on specific times (such as the opening times of the shops and the timetable of the ferry connecting the island), and NPCs make time-related appointments with the player. As a result, he may not be able to make up for missed appointments and thus put the game in an unsolvable state. Such a game design is viewed as undesirable in modern interactive fiction , but was considered progressive at the time because of the dynamic game play.
Production notes
Author Michael Berlyn has been granted special rights internally for the Cutthroats project . The distinguished author, who had published four novels and was explicitly recruited by Infocom in 1983 because of his literary background, did not get along well with the company's own ZIL engine and described it as an " object-oriented high-level programming language with a collection of compilers , runtime - Interpreters and virtual machines of infinite complexity ”. After struggling with the company's own programming environment for the Infocom games Suspended and Infidel , he rebelled against the working conditions he hated and rejected the collaboration that Douglas Adams had explicitly requested for the later successful title The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy . In order to motivate Berlyn for Cutthroats , Infocom provided him with Jerry Wolper, an MIT graduate who was supposed to take care of all technical aspects of the game.
Infocom marketed their games by theme; Cutthroats , together with the games Infidel , Seastalker , Hollywood Hijinx and Shogun, was sorted into the "Tales of Adventure" category, which can roughly be classified into the " adventure " genre used by the film industry . As inserts ("Feelies") Cutthroats contained a fictional magazine called True Tales of Adventure , a book by the fictional Hardscrabble Harbor Historical Society with information on sunken ships in the area, a diving map with length, width and depth of several wrecks and the price list of one Equipment store for diving needs. These supplements are referenced in the game and therefore represent a copy protection. Against payment, the player could, as is usual with Infocom games, request written help material for solving the game, an encrypted step-by-step solution (" InvisiClues ) as well as maps included.
With almost 80,000 copies sold, Cutthroats was relatively successful by Infocom standards.
reception
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Cutthroats received mostly positive reviews. The British Computer & Video Games praised a “good plot” and a “great sense of humor”, described the adventure as “superb” and awarded it the highest rating of 10. The Atari magazine Antic presented the leaflets and the level clearly superior to the competition of the game positively, but noted that the plot follows too rigid a framework and the puzzles of the game are partly illogical. The Ludo historian Jimmy Maher criticizes the fact that, as in his two other games for Infocom, the author Berlyn is unempathetic with his characters. At the end of the game, the player character is satisfied with his treasure and plays over the death of his friend Hevlin, who would never be solved.
Web links
- Cutthroats at MobyGames (English)
- Fact Sheet on Resonant.org
- Packaging and inserts of the game
- Maps for the game
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d Filfre.net: Cutthroats. Retrieved December 20, 2017 .
- ↑ a b IF-Legends.org: Infocom Fact Sheet. Retrieved December 20, 2017 .
- ↑ Gaming After 40: Adventure of the Week: Cutthroats (1984). Retrieved December 21, 2017 .
- ↑ Graham Nelson: The Craft of the Adventure - Five articles on the design of adventure games . 1995, p. 7th ff . ( smallwhitehouse.org [PDF]).
- ^ A b Paul Coppins: Cut-Throats (sic) . In: Computer & Video Games . No. 041, March 1985, p. 22.
- ↑ Michael Ciraolo, Jack Powell: Cutthroats . In: Antic . 3, No. 11, March 1985.