Spell breaker

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Spell breaker
Logo Spellbreaker (Infocom) .jpg
Studio Infocom
Publisher Infocom
Senior Developer Dave Lebling
Erstveröffent-
lichung		 September 16, 1985
platform Amstrad CPC , Amstrad PCW , Apple II , Atari 8-Bit , Atari ST , Commodore 64 , Commodore Amiga , MS-DOS
Game engine ZIL
genre Fantasy
Game mode Single player
control keyboard
medium diskette
language English
Current version Release 87
copy protection Feelies

Spellbreaker (English for "Zauberbrecher") is a fantasy text adventure from Infocom from 1985. It takes place in the Zork universe and would be the sixth part of the series there in terms of time. It is the third and last part of the Enchanter trilogy . The other two parts are Enchanter (1983) and Sorcerer (1984).

action

In the third part of the trilogy, the player the leader of the Circle of enchanters is (German: circle the magician ) ascended. The threat in this part of the game is that magic seems to be disappearing as an elementary part of daily life: spells fail more and more often or have strange side effects. The population is worried, the wizards' guild is at a loss. A meeting of all guilds in the country is called to discuss the situation. At this meeting, all of the participants are suddenly transformed into frogs or newts. Only the player and a shadowy figure hurriedly leaving the assembly hall seem to have survived the transformation unscathed. In the course of the game, the player must find the Cubes of Foundation (German: "Würfel der Gründungs"), with different tasks to be solved for each cube to be found sequentially. Among other things, it is necessary to deal with a doppelganger, to destroy a portal that would give its builder infinite power to travel through space and time and ultimately to override the magic as a whole.

Game principle and technology

Spellbreaker 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 Spell Breaker understands 850 words approximately, about 150 words more than in Enchanter , the first part of the trilogy. The magic system was taken over from the two predecessors and expanded as part of the plot to include the possibility that spells could fail or have unforeseen effects.

As supplements ("Feelies"), the early publications of Spellbreaker contained a (fictional) mail order catalog for magic utensils, a pin from the Guild of Wizards and six wizard quartet cards, the printed information of which also served as copy protection.

Magic in Spellbreaker

The system of magic spells is based partly on the Earth Sea saga by Ursula K. LeGuin and partly on the Vancian system of the role-playing game rules Dungeons & Dragons . As with Vance, spells must first be "stored" in the mind before they can be used, and as with LeGuin, a spell is represented by a nonsense term. This term can then be used as a verb in the game. For example, the spell "FROTZ" makes objects glow; Entering> FROTZ BOOK lights up a book accordingly. The spells that can be used are:

  • BLORPLE - Explore the target's mystical connections.
  • CASKLY - Perfects the goal.
  • ESPNIS - Brings the target to sleep.
  • FROTZ - Makes the target shine.
  • GIRGOL - Holds the time.
  • GNUSTO - Transfers a spell to the caster's spellbook so that the spell can be learned multiple times.
  • JINDAK - recognizes magic.
  • LESOCH - Generates a gust of wind.
  • LISKON - Shrinks the target.
  • MALYON - Brings dead matter to life.
  • REZROV - Opens physically or magically locked objects.
  • SNAVIG - Changes the shape of the target.
  • THROCK - Holds the time.
  • TINSOT - Freezes the target.
  • YOMIN - Makes the caster read the mind of the target.

Production notes

Infocom's decision to design and manufacture Spellbreaker was at least partially due to economic constraints. While the company set itself the goal of creating innovative and sophisticated games, and fulfilled this with games like Suspended or A Mind Forever Voyaging , which was released just a few weeks before Spellbreaker , the company's customer base grew to become a larger group of Infocom's temporarily underestimated part of fans of the Zork series. The task of writing a game in the Zork tradition that should have a high level of difficulty was given to Dave Lebling , who had previously co-written all three Zork parts and was responsible for the games Enchanter , Starcross and Suspect . Lebling had intended the title Mage for the third game in the Enchanter series, which was to be written , which would have been a logical continuation of the series , which had previously consisted of English names for those who knew magic. Marketing director Mike Dornbrook, on the other hand, wanted a title for financial reasons that cannibalized the Zork brand . A sometimes bizarre fight broke out between the two, as a result of which Dornbrook conducted arbitrary surveys among non-adventure players and Lebling secretly included his favorite name as an Easter egg in the game. With Spellbreaker , a compromise proposal from the marketing department finally prevailed.

In 2019, the source code of the game was published on the software development repository GitHub .

reception

Adventure Classic Gaming praised the liveliness of the game, achieved through successful room descriptions and the variety and depth of characters and puzzles. The opaque story and several dead ends in the game were criticized. Computer Gaming World classified the game as "transcendent" because it made a lasting impression on the player outside of the game. The magazine Popular Computing Weekly lifted the high degree of difficulty of Spell Breaker indicate praised parser and humor of the game and ruled Spell Breaker alone is worth buying a home computer required for this purpose. The nonfiction and interactive fiction author Jimmy Maher positively pointed out that Spellbreaker did indeed keep a very high level of difficulty promised by Infocom in advance, which had been demanded by fans of the Zork series. In contrast to other text adventures that are perceived as very difficult, such as The Pawn or The Wizard and the Princess , Spellbreaker does not achieve the goal by simply adding illogical or otherwise unfair puzzles, but rather the game designer has tried to create a fair, but challenging puzzle design. Maher sees the novel A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin as the primary influence on author Lebling, alongside Roger Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber .

Frotz, a Z-machine emulator, got its name from one of the spells in Spellbreaker .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Resonant.org: Spellbreaker. Retrieved April 21, 2018 .
  2. ↑ a b Filfre.net: Spellbreaker. Retrieved September 13, 2016 .
  3. ↑ GitHub.com: Spellbreaker (ARCHMAGE, MAGE, ZORK 6) by Dave Lebling (Infocom). Retrieved April 18, 2019 .
  4. ↑ AdventureClassicGaming.com: Spellbreaker. Retrieved September 13, 2016 .
  5. ↑ Computer Gaming World 39, August / September 1987, p. 39, available online
  6. ↑ Popular Computing Weekly Vol. 5 No. 4, January 1986, p. 12, available online