Planetfall
| Planetfall | |
|---|---|
| Original title | Planetfall |
| Studio | Infocom |
| Publisher | Infocom |
| Senior Developer | Steve Meretzky |
| Erstveröffent- lichung |
1983 |
| platform | Apple II , Atari 8-bit , Atari ST , Commodore 64 , Commodore 128 , Commodore Amiga , MS-DOS , Macintosh , Schneider CPC , TI-99 / 4A , TRS-80 |
| Game engine | Z-machine |
| genre | Text adventure |
| Subject | Science fiction |
| control | keyboard |
| medium | diskette |
| language | English |
| copy protection | Enclosure referencing ("Feelies") |
Planetfall is a science fiction - text adventure by Steve Meretzky , the 1983 US development studio and publisher Infocom was published. Meretzky's first work became a bestseller for Infocom, so that a (less successful) sequel called Stationfall was developed a few years later . Planetfall was classified by Infocom as "Standard" in the internal difficulty rating and is a case-study from Planet and Landfall . There are many similarities between Planetfall and Space Quest from 1986; In both games the protagonist is a kind of "space caretaker", his spaceship is destroyed or made unfit to drive, whereupon he ends up on a strange planet from which he has to flee.
action
In the game you take on the role of a humble seventh class ensign on the spaceship SPS Feinstein , who was assigned to scrubbing the deck by his superior. After an unexpected series of explosions on board, he uses an escape capsule and lands on a nearby planet. There are signs of civilization but no signs of living things. Together with a helpful robot named Floyd , the player must now solve the riddles of the planet and find a way to return home.
Game principle and technology
Planetfall is a text adventure, which means that the environment and events are displayed as screen text and the visualization is up to the player's imagination. The game is controlled by entering commands to the character on the keyboard. The commands are processed in turn by a parser and the effects of the move on the game world are calculated.
Production notes
Like most Infocom games, Planetfall was launched for numerous different hardware platforms at the same time. There were versions for PC as well as various contemporary home computers such as Amiga , Apple II , Atari home computers , Atari ST , C64 , C128 , Macintosh , Schneider CPC , TI-99 / 4A and TRS-80 . Since 1982 Infocom has included various extras in its game packaging, in the case of Planetfall these were:
- A Stellar Patrol Special Assignment Task Force badge in the shape of a credit card
- 3 postcards
- A Stellar Patrol handbook entitled "Boldly Going Where Angels Fear to Tread"
Planetfall worked as many games from Infocom with so-called red herring ( red herrings ): It contains a number of useless items unreachable locations and misleading clues. In absolute contrast to the text adventures available at the time, it was unnecessary, even impossible to get a lamp in order to be able to enter the "dark areas" (see Zork ) that were common at that time . There is a lamp ready in a laboratory, but the player dies every time he tries to pick it up. There was the possibility to edit the program code so that the player could take possession of the lamp. If you went to the "dark areas", the game responded with the message "You should not be here."
In 1988, the American science fiction writer Arthur Byron Cover published the novel Planetfall , the content of which is closely based on the game.
In 2019, the source code of the game was published on the software development repository GitHub .
reception
The Ludo historian Jimmy Maher points out in his university thesis that Planetfall is one of the first text adventures with a coherent, complex story. It was unusual for the game to be equipped with a foreign culture that gradually presented itself, as well as the use of a sidekick that created a high emotional bond with the game. Overall, Planetfall is playing "more like literature than a text adventure".
literature
- Arthur Byron Cover: Planetfall . Avon Books, New York 1988, ISBN 0-380-75384-7 .
Web links
- Planetfall at MobyGames (English)
- Planetfall photos and scans of packaging and contents
Individual evidence
- ↑ GitHub.com: Planetfall, by Steve Meretzky (Infocom). Retrieved April 18, 2019 .
- ↑ Jimmy Maher: Let's Tell a Story Together. A History of Interactive Fiction . University of Texas, Dallas 2006 ( filfre.net ).