Enchanted Scepters
| Enchanted Scepters | |
|---|---|
| Studio | Silicon Beach software |
| Publisher | Silicon Beach software |
| Senior Developer | William Appleton |
| Erstveröffent- lichung |
1984 |
| platform | Mac OS |
| Game engine | World Builder |
| genre | Adventure |
| medium | diskette |
| language | English |
Enchanted scepter (German about: Enchanted scepter ) is a computer game from 1984. It was released exclusively for the Apple Macintosh and is considered the first point-and-click adventure in the history of computer games.
action
Enchanted Scepters is set in the fantasy kingdom of Callion. The warring Hurks assemble a large army on the southern border of the empire. Callion's only hope is the magician Elron, who could stop the Hurks with a powerful spell. For this spell, Elron needs the four eponymous sceptres, which are assigned to the elements air, water, fire and earth and which disappeared decades ago and are believed to be in different parts of the kingdom. The search for the sceptres is too dangerous for Elron himself, so his apprentice Saber is entrusted with the task. The player takes on the role of Saber.
Game principle and technology
Enchanted Scepters is a 1st person 2D point-and-click adventure with still images. The screen is divided into three elements: Two thirds of the area is taken up by a window for hand-drawn graphics that show a section of the game world, which is over 200 rooms, from the perspective of the player. The right third is reserved for a window in which the game is displayed in text form. At the top there are dropout menus with commands for controlling the game, which are based on the operating system of the then new Mac OS . Technically, Enchanted Scepters works like a text adventure : commands and objects or people to which the commands refer are analyzed and processed by a parser . The innovation of Enchanted Scepters is that for the first time inputs were not entered via the keyboard, but could be generated using the mouse by clicking a command and elements of the current still image. Text input is possible in parallel and also necessary in several places.
The game contains role-playing elements. NPCs can be hostile to the player. In this case, the fight is turn-based. Like a role-playing game, the game manages the player's physical and mental health, as well as their experience and wealth. As in role-playing games, the player dies if he runs out of life energy during a fight.
The game contained a system called "RealSound" for reproducing digitized sound effects.
Production notes
Designer William Appleton was studying economics at a graduate school when the Macintosh 128k appeared in January 1984 . He bought the device. Since there were initially no suitable programming languages for the Mac, he learned assembler . As a fan of text adventures, he wanted to create an adventure himself and, like Scott Adams , Infocom or Level 9 , chose the approach of first creating a game engine and a scripting language on the basis of which a game could then be created. With the help of the World Builder engine he created, he designed the game Enchanted Scepters as a sample program and offered the engine to the San Diego- based company Silicon Beach Software for marketing. Silicon Beach bought the rights to World Builder and Enchanted Scepters and initially released the game. The company originally planned to produce four adventure games based on World Builder technology. However, due to disappointing sales figures, the other three adventure games were never realized. The game engine itself was launched in 1986 as an independent product; 1995 programmer William Appleton placed it under a freeware license.
In 1990, Lost Crystal, a fan adventure , was released, which was also created with the World Builder engine and linked to Enchanted Scepters in terms of content , so that it is referred to as the "unofficial successor".
reception
The Eurogamer offshoot US Gamer assessed in a retrospective that Enchanted Scepters are not much of a look from today's perspective, but were "a look into the crystal ball" for gamers at the time. It had remarkable sound effects and detailed graphics at the time. The US magazine GameGrin noted that genre fans at the time “thought they were in heaven”, as the new operating concept meant that there was no need to remember precise commands that had to be typed in.
Web links
- Enchanted Scepters at MobyGames (English)
- Enchanted Scepters on the Internet Archive
Individual evidence
- ↑ MacintoshGarden.org: Enchanted Scepters Manual. Retrieved October 31, 2018 .
- ^ Richard Moss: The Secret History of Mac Gaming . Unbound Publishing, London 2018, ISBN 978-1-78352-487-7 .
- ↑ Gamasutra.com: The making of Dark Castle: An excerpt from The Secret History of Mac Gaming. Retrieved November 3, 2018 .
- ^ MacintoshGarden: Lost Crystal. Retrieved November 3, 2018 .
- ↑ USGamer.net: The Return of a Macintosh shareware Classic. Retrieved November 3, 2018 .
- ↑ GameGrin.com: An Adventure Game Retrospective. Retrieved November 3, 2018 .