Dragonworld (computer game)
| Dragonworld | |
|---|---|
| Studio | Byron Preiss Video Productions |
| Publisher | Telarium |
| Senior Developer | Byron Preiss , Michael Reaves |
| Erstveröffent- lichung |
1984 |
| platform | Apple II , C 64 , DOS , MSX2 |
| Game engine | Spinnaker Adventure Language (SAL) |
| genre | Text adventure with graphics |
| Game mode | Single player |
| control | keyboard |
| language | English Spanish |
Dragonworld is a computer game by the US company Telarium (formerly: Trillium) from 1984. It belongs to the genre of text adventures with graphics ( Interactive Fiction with Graphics ) and is based on a novel by the authors Byron Preiss and Michael Reaves .
action
The action takes place in a fantasy world in which the neighboring countries Fandora and Simbala are located. In the novel Dragonworld , two very different inhabitants of these countries, the naturalist Amsel from Fandora and the warrior king Hawkwind from Simbala, had to pull together to save the Last Dragon from the hands of kidnappers. In the computer game, the last dragon was kidnapped again, and the player in the form of blackbird sets out to first visit his friend Hawkwind and then together to save the last dragon again.
Game principle and technology
Dragonworld 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. In contrast to pure text adventures, Dragonworld has hand-drawn still images that take up about 40% of the screen and illustrate what is happening. They were drawn by the artist John Pierard.
The first edition of the game included three mini-games that required motor skills from the player and, due to poor programming on the home computers of the time, ran so slowly that the publisher Telatrium had them removed for further editions of the game.
Production notes
Elementary school teacher Byron Preiss had produced a successful comic in 1971 together with comic artist James Steranko. A few years later he founded Byron Preiss Visual Publications. In 1976 he initiated the graphic novel series Illustrated Fiction , for which Preiss usually wrote the stories and illustrators such as Tom Sutton or Howard Chaykin did the illustration. The fifth work in this series should be a fantasy saga called Dragonworld , which Preiss wrote together with the young American author Michael Reaves. At the end of the 1970s, the Fantasy Illustrated series had become a financial risk for Preiss' publishing house due to a lack of success, so that he crushed the concept and rewrote Dragonworld together with Reaves into a conventional fantasy novel, which, however, included numerous illustrations of the Artist Joe Zucker , who temporarily lived in an apartment with Preiss and Reaves.
Byron Preiss had previously had some success with the conversion of the novel Rendezvous mit 31/439 by the science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke into a computer game ( Rendezvous with Rama ). He held the rights to Dragonworld , which as a novel was at least not a failure from a financial point of view, so that implementation seemed easy to accomplish and financially lucrative. Michael Reaves was able to win over again as a co-author. Additional texts were contributed by the up-and-coming author Brynne Chandler , who had just gained a foothold as a writer for the animated series Masters of the Universe and made a name for herself as a translator of manga in the 2000s .
The MSX2 version of the game is translated into Spanish and has new illustrations.
reception
In the 1980s, game reviews emphasized the detailed graphics, the varied options for action and the atmospheric fantasy atmosphere of the adventure. In the test report of a computer magazine, the vocabulary of the text parser , the graphics and the action were each rated as very good.
In a study of computer game history and theory from 1993, Dragonworld was characterized as a "computer comic".
Web links
- Dragonworld at MobyGames (English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Filfre.net: Dragonworld. Retrieved December 22, 2019 .
- ↑ See Heinrich Lenhardt : Help for the last dragon . In: Happy Computer 6/1985; ders .: 7 class adventures in one go . In: Happy Computer 9/1985, p. 146f.
- ↑ Cf. Werner Faulstich : Of Trolls, Magicians, Power and Other Wondrous Adventures. Small introduction to interactive computer fairy tales . In: Journal for Literary Studies and Linguistics Volume 92 (1993), pp. 96-125 (esp. P. 98).