Seastalker
| Seastalker | |
|---|---|
.jpg&filetimestamp=20170818140311&) | |
| Studio | Infocom |
| Publisher | Infocom |
| Senior Developer | Stuart Galley , Jim Lawrence |
| Erstveröffent- lichung |
May 15, 1984 |
| platform | Apple II , Atari 8-Bit , Atari ST , Commodore 64 , Commodore Amiga , MS-DOS , Schneider CPC , TRS-80 , TI-99 / 4A , Mac OS |
| Game engine | ZIL |
| genre | Text adventure |
| Game mode | Single player |
| control | keyboard |
| medium | diskette |
| language | English |
| copy protection | Enclosure referencing |
Seastalker (English for “sea stalker” ) is a text adventure from Infocom from 1984. It is the company's only game that is aimed at a young target group.
action
The player is a young oceanologist and inventor. The submarine research station Aquadome, the first of its kind, asks for help when a sea monster is attacking the station. Together with his assistant Tip, the player visits the station with the help of the self-developed two-man submarine Scimitar and conducts investigations that reveal clues to the evil Dr. Thorpe deliver. An additional problem turns out to be that there is a saboteur on board the station. It is the player's task to save the station from real and supposed threats.
Game principle and technology
Seastalker 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 parser of Seastalker understands about 900 words, which is significantly more than the parser of Zork dominated.
The game can be personalized by entering the player's name. With this name the player is addressed by other characters, his company is named after him, and the name appears in numerous documents. A technical innovation compared to previous Infocom games is the split screen, a division of the screen into two independent areas. The split screen is used in the game to display a map of the surroundings consisting of ASCII characters in the upper half of the screen while the submarine Scimitar is in motion .
As enclosures ("Feelies") the early Seastalker releases included a Discovery Squad sticker, a nautical map of Frobton Bay, four info cards with a decoder to read them, and a log of the submarine that is used to travel around the game . These supplements were referenced in the game and therefore represented copy protection. For example, exits from rooms in the game are not mentioned, but are clearly evident from the map material. The info cards contained hints for solving specific problems in the game.
Production notes
In 1984, Infocom, which had previously been successful with fantasy, science fiction and crime adventures, tried to expand its business model to other genres. One concept was text adventures for a younger target group who dealt with the booming game books . Another corporate goal was to employ external, professional authors. James Duncan "Jim" Lawrence, born in 1918, was hired for Seastalker , which was recommended by the manufacturer for a target group of nine years and over. Since 1941 he has been writing for various clients, including the radio series Green Hornet and the crime series Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew . He had no experience with computer games, which is why the Infocom author Stu Galley, who had written The Witness the year before , was put at his side. Galley was based at Infocom in Massachusetts , Lawrence in New Jersey , so the collaboration between the two was largely by letter and telephone. Seastalker was based on the structure of the American youth adventure book series Tom Swift . It is the first game that Infocom used the term Interactive Fiction to differentiate itself from the competition.
The author duo Galley / Lawrence published the crime adventure Moonmist in 1986 , Lawrence's last work in the field of computer games. The author died in 1994.
In 2019, the source code of the game was published on the software development repository GitHub .
reception
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Seastalker sold a total of about 40,000 times, including 30,000 units within the first six months. Infocom had a good start to sales, but the game was not a success overall in the long-term oriented text adventure market. One possible reason for this is the Wishbringer published by Infocom in 1985 , which was not explicitly aimed at young people, but was at least designed as a beginner's adventure and thus partly served the same target group.
Seastalker is the only Infocom game whose level of difficulty has been classified as "Junior" by the company. It is aimed at young people who do not need to have any experience with text adventures. The US magazine Computer Gaming World noted accordingly that the game was rather unsuitable for gamers who did not belong to this target group because of its simplicity. Furthermore, some minor inadequacies of the parser were criticized in the CGW . The game's humor and the extensive package inserts were positively highlighted. For the German magazine Happy Computer , editor Heinrich Lenhardt described Seastalker as a “very lovingly made text adventure for players with advanced English skills”, praised the intelligent parser and the lavish features of the game with supplements and pointed out that it is playable in the German-speaking area because of the required, advanced English skills is more suitable for an adult audience.
Web links
- Seastalker at MobyGames (English)
- Seastalker Fact Sheet on Resonant.org
- Seastalker at GUETech.org (pictures of packaging and inserts)
- Complete solution on Textfiles.com
Individual evidence
- ↑ Seastalker Fact Sheet ( Memento of the original from February 11, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. on Resonant.org
- ↑ a b c Filfre.net: Seastalker. Retrieved August 20, 2017 .
- ↑ SF-Encyclopedia.com: Jim Lawrence. Retrieved August 20, 2017 .
- ↑ GitHub.com: Seastalker, by Stu Galley and Jim Lawrence (Infocom). Retrieved April 18, 2019 .
- ^ Paul Coppins: Seastalker . In: Computer and Video Games . No. 41, March 1985, p. 145.
- ↑ Patricia Fitzgibbons: Seastalker . In: Computer Gaming World . No. 45, October 1984, p. 38.
- ^ Heinrich Lenhardt: Seastalker - a sophisticated adventure . In: Happy Computer . January 1985, p. 147.
