Plundered Hearts
| Plundered Hearts | |
|---|---|
| Studio | Infocom |
| Publisher | Infocom |
| Senior Developer | Amy Briggs |
| Erstveröffent- lichung |
July 30, 1987 |
| platform | Apple II , Atari 8-Bit , Atari ST , Commodore 64 , Commodore Amiga , Mac OS , MS-DOS |
| Game engine | ZIL |
| genre | Text adventure |
| Game mode | Single player |
| control | keyboard |
| medium | diskette |
| language | English |
| copy protection | Enclosure referencing ( Feelies ) |
Plundered Hearts (German: Looted heart ) is a computer game from Infocom from the year 1987. The text adventure written by Amy Briggs, the only woman among the Infocom authors.
action
The player takes on the role of Lady Dimsford, a young lady in London at the end of the 17th century. She receives a letter from Jean Lafond, governor of the fictional Caribbean island of St. Sinistra. Lafond informs her that her father is on St. Sinistra and is seriously ill and that having his daughter with him will aid his recovery process. Conveniently, he has sent her a ship, the Lafond Deux , to take her to the Caribbean. Before arriving in St. Sinistra, the Lafond Deux is attacked by pirates and Lady Dimsford is kidnapped by pirate captain Nicholas "The Falcon" Jamison, who claims to be acting on behalf of her father and to have an account with Lafond, who murdered his brother have. At first the protagonist is torn between Lafond and Jamison, but later Lafond turns out to be the villain who holds Lady Dimsford's father prisoner. Jamison sets out to free Lady Dimsford's father and leaves the player to his own devices. The aim of the game is to thwart Lafond's plans and thus enable a happy future at the side of Jamison, who as the game progresses repeatedly has to be rescued from dangerous situations.
Game principle and technology
Plundered Hearts 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 Plundered Hearts parser has a vocabulary of 816 words; the game comprises a total of 57 rooms, which is about the scope of the other Infocom games of 1987 (with the exception of Douglas Adams ' Bureaucracy and Brian Moriarty's Beyond Zork , which were about twice as large). Plundered Hearts includes a larger number of situations in which the player is killed or raped by improper action, which ends the game. Such a design was common for contemporary games, but was condemned as bad for text adventures of later generations ( interactive fiction ).
Production notes
In the early 1980s, writer Amy Briggs found the genre of text adventure while studying English at Macalester College in her home state of Minnesota . Playing Zork made her a fan of Infocom's games. After completing her studies, she moved to Boston in 1985 to look for work and by chance came across a job advertisement from Infocom, who were looking for someone to manage the quality of their games in nearby Cambridge and were hiring Briggs. Steve Meretzky taught her to program in ZIL , the programming language developed by Infocom for the company's games. After Infocom was bought by Activision in 1985 , the new owner demanded a significant increase in the number of games completed per year. Additional authors were required for their realization. Encouraged by Meretzky, Briggs applied and was given the mandate to write and program his own game within nine months.
When Briggs presented her concept of a text adventure in the style of a romance novel , the Infocom management was open-minded, as they saw the potential to open up new groups of buyers. Meretzky suggested that she come up with a simpler concept, as he considered the interaction between player and NPCs necessary for a romance to be technically too complex for a new author. Briggs insisted on implementing her concept. Stylistically, she decided on a mixture of a love story in Jane Austen's Regency style and a pompous love drama in the style of a Bodice Ripper . She left out sex scenes with a view to younger buyer groups. The game's working title was Plundered Hearts . She chose the Caribbean in the golden age of piracy as the setting, avoiding exact dates. A historically accurate representation of the living conditions of that time was not a concern of her, rather she wanted to show the development of a clichéd passive character to a heroine in a humorous way.
"Plundered Hearts is about as historically accurate as an Errol Flynn movie."
It took Briggs about six months to draft the game. She spent another three months making adjustments to the technology: Since the underlying game engine Z-machine can only process 128 KB of data, which includes all the text of a game in addition to variables, Briggs had to shorten her game so that it stayed within this limit . One consequence of this restriction is that the game world is limited to action-relevant locations.
Plundered Hearts contained a velvet-look pouch containing a 50 guineas banknote from the fictional state of St. Sinistra and the letter from Jean Lafond to the protagonist as enclosures ("Feelies") . These supplements, which, despite their nature, do not have a precise dating, are referenced in the game and therefore represent copy protection.
For Infocom, Plundered Hearts was the only game in the romance segment and the only game with a female protagonist. For Briggs herself, Plundered Hearts was the first and only game she was responsible for. After the game was released, she developed a concept for a vampire adventure based on the works of Anne Rice , who was at the beginning of her career , which was rejected by the Infocom management. The management wanted to persuade her to work with the writer Garrison Keillor , whom she personally knew , but Briggs refused, quit Infocom and turned her back on the game business.
Briggs was the babysitter of Ron Gilbert , who was two years his junior , and Plundered Hearts was one of the sources of inspiration for his adventure game The Secret of Monkey Island in 1990 .
reception
The US magazine Compute! compared the game's theme and style to the work of the writer Rosemary Rogers , who was known for her cheap romance novels in the Bodice Ripper style. The magazine assessed that Amy Briggs had filled her plot with “love, passion, dangerous situations, passion, intrigue, passion, adventure and even more passion”, wrote “excellent prose” and captured the “exotic flair” of his setting well. Editor James Trunzo found it "strange" to put yourself in the shoes of a character who longs for another man. The Computer Gaming World criticized that Plundered Hearts was unrealistic and full of logic gaps in many places, but "not as bad as expected (due to the topic)". The game's puzzles were also praised. For the US magazine ST Log , editor Betty DeMunn expressed her excitement about finally being able to take on the role of a female protagonist in a computer game. Briggs' writing style is brilliant and amusing. DeMunn criticized the accumulation of clichés that express themselves in the course of the plot and the puzzles, but above all in the helplessness and passivity of the protagonist.
In an interview in Infocom's customer magazine The Status Line , author Amy Briggs noted that with Plundered Hearts she had neither a feminist nor the paternalistic approach of romance novels in mind; rather, feminism and romanticism are not mutually exclusive.
"Feminism does not rule out romance, and romance does not necessarily have to make women weak in the cliche sense of romance novels."
Plundered Hearts sold around 15,500 units, making it a commercial failure for Infocom.
In a retrospective in 2015, the ludo historian Jimmy Maher noted that the atmosphere of the game was applied rather thickly and that Plundered Hearts therefore walked a fine line between genre homage and parody . For Infocom this style is nothing unusual, the previously published games of the fantasy and science fiction genres are also characterized by a love of the genre and sarcastic exaggerations. In contrast to Infocom's backlist , Plundered Hearts is completely free of self-referential allusions to earlier games, which is a refreshing “new wind” after the constantly self-citing Zork games. Maher analyzed that of all Infocom games published to date, Plundered Hearts came closest to the credo of an interactive story ( interactive fiction ), since the author Briggs presented a continuous plot instead of a puzzle connected by a framework, which focused on varied events and character development would be.
Web links
- Plundered Hearts at MobyGames (English)
- Plundered Hearts at GUETech.org
Individual evidence
- ↑ Infocom-IF.org: Plundered Hearts. Retrieved January 12, 2020 .
- ↑ a b c d e Filfre.net: Plundered Hearts. Retrieved January 11, 2020 .
- ↑ Gamasutra.com: The Player's Bill of Rights. Retrieved January 15, 2020 .
- ↑ Filfre.net: ... and Into the Fire. Retrieved January 11, 2020 .
- ↑ XYZZYNews.com: Romancing the Genre: An interview with Plundered Hearts author Amy Briggs ( Memento from January 6, 2006 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ 2PlayerProductions: Ron Gilbert's Words of Wisdom to Tim Schafer. Retrieved October 29, 2017 . (Youtube.com)
- ↑ James V. Trunzo: Plundered Hearts and Nord and Bert Couldn't Make Head or Tail of It . In: Compute! . No. 92, January 1988, p. 44.
- ↑ Scorpia: Scorpion's Tale: Plundered Hearts . In: Computer Gaming World . No. 42, December 1987, p. 10. (PDF, 26 MB)
- ↑ Betty DeMunn: Review: Plundered Hearts . In: ST Log . No. 20, June 1988, p. 90. (PDF, 60 MB)
- ^ Infocom's First Romance . In: The Status Line . VI, No. 4, p. 9.