Lords of Time

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Lords of Time
Studio Level 9
Publisher Level 9
Senior Developer Sue Gazzard
Erstveröffent-
lichung		 January 1, 1984
platform Atari 8-bit , Atari ST , BBC Micro , Commodore 64 , Commodore Amiga , Enterprise , Mac OS Classic , Memotech MTX , MS-DOS , MSX , Nascom , Oric Atmos , Schneider CPC , ZX Spectrum
Game engine A code
genre Text adventure
medium Floppy disk , cassette
language English

Lords of Time (German: Herren der Zeit ) is a text adventure from the British development studio Level 9 . It was published in 1984 for then common home computers . The theme of the game is time travel .

action

The player is at the present time (i. E. In the 1980s, when the game was) unaware of his work to when he spoke of Father Time ( Father Time is contacted). This gives him the task of using a time machine in the form of a grandfather clock to recover nine artifacts, which would thwart the machinations of the evil masters of the time who manipulated history in different epochs. The artefacts, which are located in different time periods, are marked by a stylized hourglass and must be thrown into a cauldron in the "fog of time" by the player. If the player is successful, the cauldron emits a magical aura, which prevents the machinations of the masters of time and restores the "structure of time".

epoch artifact
present teardrop shaped diamond
Ice age Mammoth tusk
Mesozoic Dinosaur egg
Viking age Olive branch
middle Ages Dragon wings
16th Century Fool's cap
future Silicon chip
Roman Empire Golden belt buckle
"Fog of Time" "Evil eye"

Game principle and technology

Game scene

Lords of Time 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, additional locations in the game world, which consists of over 200 rooms, will be unlocked.

The game was developed with the help of Engine A-Code, developed by Level 9 itself , which contained a virtual machine and was therefore portable to other systems without a significant expenditure of time. The game could therefore be published for a variety of home computers. A-Code relied on highly developed algorithms for text compression and was able to accommodate all the texts and variables required for the game in 32  kB of memory. The parser was significantly improved compared to the games previously published by Level 9 and for the first time allowed reflexive references and collective terms for several objects. In total, the parser understood over 200 words, which was a positive performance for small home computers like the ZX Spectrum with its 48 kB memory, but could not keep up with Infocom's games designed for computers with 64 kB memory - the five-month parser Infocom's previously published Enchanter , for example, understood over 700 words.

Production notes

Lords of Time is the final level 9 adventure game with no illustrative graphics and one of the few games from the company that was not written by company founder Pete Austin. The rough draft of the script came from Sue Gazzard, a British housewife with no games industry ties who was a fan of Level 9 games and contacted the company with a first draft for a game based on the British TV series Doctor Who . Level 9 let Gazzard write the script; Pete Austin acted as co-author and made sure that there were no Doctor Who reminiscences in the final product. The working title of the game was Timelords . The original edition of the game was packaged with a poster.

In 1988, Level 9 released Lords of Time as part of the Time and Magik game trilogy , which also contained the thematically unrelated games Red Moon and The Price of Magik . Lords of Time has been revised for this trilogy . The biggest difference to the 1983 version were the newly implemented images that graphically highlight the respective game scene. The images were only used in versions that had a floppy disk as the storage medium and thus had sufficient storage space for the image files. Level 9 had already used an identical concept for the compilations Jewels of Darkness and Silicon Dreams , but each of them contained three thematically related adventures. At the time the trilogy was published, home computer technology was significantly advanced compared to the time it was originally published, so that Lords of Time also appeared in 1988 with common hardware such as the Amiga and Atari ST home computers and personal computers with the Macintosh System Software and MS-DOS operating systems . Time and Magik included a 23-page novella by Peter McBride integrated into the manual , which Level 9 used as copy protection by querying certain text passages . Since the three games in the trilogy have nothing in common, the novella consists of three different chapters. McBride, who later became a non-fiction author, also wrote novels for other Level 9 adventure novels, such as Gnome Ranger , Ingrid's Back and Knight Orc .

The game deals with style features quite freely. The time epochs that can be visited are not accurately reproduced, but adapted to the overall dramaturgy. This leads to non-genre elements such as talking plants, various fantasy elements and symbolisms such as a walkable “ Milky Way ”. The figure of "Father Time" is an anthropomorphic personification of time that is common in Anglo-American culture .

reception

reviews
publication Rating
Eurogamer 8/10
Personal computer games 8/10

The British magazine Personal Computer Games praised the descriptions of the rooms, which “fire the imagination”, as well as the large vocabulary of the parser, but missed auxiliary functions for the player. The magazine assessed that Lords of Time would meet the high standards of the manufacturer and "belong on the (...) shelf". For British Crash magazine, reviewer Fraser Hubbard found it "impossible to describe what a brilliant adventure" Lord of Time was. He made his positive impression on the “realistic” descriptions, which created a “remarkable” atmosphere and ensured that the game was “definitely worth the money”. The Computer & Video Games pointed out that the game could be played in sections because of its modular structure. The magazine positively emphasized the texts and the scope of the game, criticized occasional decompression errors (which were noticeable by incorrect texts) and a parser that could be improved in places, and praised that Lords of Time was fun, not too difficult and motivating for a long time . The British magazine Eurogamer held a retrospective in 2007 that Lords of Time introduced the player “organically” into the game. Reviewer Spanner Spencer praised it as a first experience for him that a text adventure was qualitatively comparable to a novel; he therefore called Lords of Time an "interactive novel". The Ludo historian Jimmy Maher defined Lords of Time as part of an analysis of the Level 9 company history as a “ Doctor Who- inspired, independent time travel epic ”. The writer Thomas A. Christie analyzed that Lords of Time promises the player a quickly accessible scenario, but then develops a high level of complexity. He classified the game in the genre of fantasy and pointed out that the individual epochs are easily identifiable and delimitable for the player and enable him to immerse himself quickly ; both make the game very accessible.

The British ACE magazine presented the Time and Magik trilogy with the ACE Adventure Award 1988 in the “Best Value of the Year” category.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Lords of Time . In: Personal Computer Games . No. 5, April 1984, p. 74.
  2. ↑ IF-Legends.org: Level 9 Computing. Retrieved March 17, 2018 .
  3. ^ A b Thomas A. Christie: The Spectrum of Adventure . Extremis Publishing, Stirling 2016, ISBN 978-0-9934932-1-8 , pp. 41 .
  4. ↑ Filfre.net: This Tormented Business, Part 1. Retrieved March 17, 2018 .
  5. ↑ SanFranSys.com: About Peter McBride. Retrieved March 17, 2018 .
  6. ↑ a b Eurogamer.net: Lords of Time: Time for Text. Retrieved March 17, 2018 .
  7. ↑ Fraser Hubbard: Lords of Time . In: Crash . April 1984, p. 30.
  8. ↑ Keith Campbell: Lords of Time . In: Computer & Video Games . No. 31, May 1984, p. 165.
  9. ↑ Filfre.net: The End of the Line for Level 9 as the Market Takes Its Toll on Magnetic Scrolls. Retrieved March 17, 2018 .
  10. ^ AAA 1988 - The ACE Adventure Awards . In: ACE . No. 16, January 1989, p. 143.