Telarium

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Telarium
legal form Corporation
founding 1984 (as Trillium)
resolution 1987
Seat Cambridge, Massachusetts , United StatesUnited StatesUnited States 
management C. David Seuss
Branch Software development

The Telarium Corporation (formerly: Trillium) was an American publisher that existed from 1984 to 1987 and was based in Cambridge, Massachusetts , a suburb of Boston . Telarium published computer games that mostly belonged to the genre of text adventures with graphics and were based on literary models. There was a collaboration with well-known writers such as Michael Crichton , Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke .

History (1984 to 1987)

overview

Telarium, a subsidiary of Spinnaker Software , had the legal form of a US corporation . In the Corporation, a corporation , appoint usually a board of directors , the management ( Officers ), to which normally a president , a chief executive officer and corporate secretary include. Telarium's president was C. David Seuss, who was also the founder and CEO of Spinnaker Software. The software company Spinnaker Software was founded in 1982 and published educational software and computer games. The establishment of the Telarium Corporation in 1984 was part of a marketing strategy to open up new market segments: While the Windham Classics Corporation , also a subsidiary of Spinnaker, was intended to address the target group of younger adventure gamers, Telarium was aimed at adult adventure gamers.

Initially, the company had the name Trillium , but then changed it to Telarium , possibly due to trademark problems with the Trillium Press publisher. As a legal entity , Telarium Corporation had e.g. B. formally the possibility to conclude license agreements for the game adaptation of the novel as well as developer agreements with the game designers in one's own name . In fact, there was close cooperation with the parent company in parts of the business, especially in sales.

After three years of business, the Telarium Corporation went out in 1987. At the end of the 1980s, the entire market segment of text-based adventure games fell into a crisis; for example B. also the company Infocom in 1989 its business operations. In the period that followed, point-and-click adventures from LucasArts and other companies became more popular, until they too lost their importance in the 1990s.

The parent company Spinnaker Software Corporation was taken over by SoftKey in 1993/94 . C. David Seuss became President of SoftKey. In 1996 SoftKey took over competitor The Learning Company and has operated under that name ever since. After a temporary takeover by the toy company Mattel , The Learning Company is now a subsidiary of the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company and publishes learning software and adventure games.

Adventure development

A special feature was the collaboration with established writers. The responsible product manager, Seth Godin , commented on this as part of an adventure feature in a computer magazine. After that, the texts in Dragonworld and Amazon come completely from the authors (" Byron Preiss and Michael Crichton wrote every word of the game"), while in other cases there was close text coordination with the authors ("In the case of Fahrenheit 451 and Rendezvous with Rama , we worked with the authors on the editings and the way it worked. We didn't just buy their names "). Several Telarium adventures have been developed under the leadership of Byron Preiss and his company Byron Preiss Video Productions. Preiss, who had also worked as a publisher and book packager since the 1970s , considered the intensive dialogue with authors about the narrative peculiarities of the adventure genre compared to books and films to be important in order to create suitable storylines ("The key point is having a dialogue with the author ").

The content-related focus of the adventures was less on the solution of puzzles than on the quality of the plot and the description texts as well as the interaction possibilities of the player with other non-player characters . A development focus was on the performance of the parser , which - like the parser of the competitor Infocom - should have the ability to process complex sentences and not just individual words or short sentences. The first Telarium games such as Dragonworld and Fahrenheit 451 already met this criterion; For follow-up adventures like Nine Princes in Amber , the programmers focused on improvements in speed, vocabulary and grammar.

Technically, the games were implemented for typical platforms of the 1980s such as C 64 , DOS , ZX Spectrum , Atari ST , MSX , Mac OS and Apple II . In addition to English-language versions, some game versions for the MSX were also published in Spanish. It was controlled with keyboard entries that were processed in a text parser ; In some cases it was also controlled using a joystick or mouse. The Telarium Adventures had two-dimensional graphics, theme songs and sound effects. The graphics of most of the games were mainly for illustrative purposes, but some were also functional (e.g. objects were shown that the player character could take; non-player characters could be asked about the objects shown). The adventure Shadowkeep was a hybrid of point-and-click adventure and role-playing game.

Adventure title

Telarium published its adventures on the basis of literary templates, which mainly came from the genres of crime , science fiction and fantasy . The game was partly developed in collaboration with well-known writers. The following titles have been published:

1984

1985

1986

  • The Scoop (developed on the basis of the crime novel of the same name by Agatha Christie and others)

Two other titles - Starman Jones , the adaptation of the science fiction novel by Robert A. Heinlein and The Great Adventure , based on a science fiction novel by Philip José Farmer - were planned and announced in the program preview, but were not more published. An adaptation of works by the science fiction author Harry Harrison was still in the planning stage .

Significance and aftermath

Telarium in journalistic articles on computer games

In the 1980s, the Telarium Adventures were recognized in game reviews by computer game magazines for their high text quality, detailed graphics and versatile dialog options with non-player characters .

In the early 2000s, an article in the online magazine Telepolis emphasized the pioneering role of "legendary companies of the text era such as Infocom and Telarium" for later point-and-click adventures by LucasArts and other companies.

In a writer interview on literature and computer games, the online magazine GameSpy saw the telarium game Shadowkeep ("a groundbreaking product at the time") as a pioneer of later computer role-playing games such as the Eye of the Beholder series by Westwood Studios and Strategic simulations .

Telarium in investigations into the history and theory of computer games

Telarium Corporation and its adventures have been featured in several studies on the history and theory of computer games .

Werner Faulstich (1993) counted Telarium among the most important companies in the adventure game genre ("Infocom, Mindscape , Telarium and Brøderbund Softwareare important manufacturers"). He characterized adventures like Dragonworld as "´computer comics", ie text-image computer games ". The adventure Fahrenheit 451 is a highly complex, interactive computer fairy tale and "at the same time literature, a game with classics and at the same time with the narrator, the player himself".

Konrad Lischka (2002 and 2005) stated that Telarium was one of the first commercial providers of computer games. He characterized Telarium as a games company that emphasized its closeness to literature, e.g. B. by developing titles based on the work of writers such as Arthur C. Clarke and Agatha Christie, and by contributing to the creation of Fahrenheit 451 by writer Ray Bradbury. However, this direct reference to literature leads to the fact that - contrary to what some players would like - narrative aspects are more in the foreground than the gaming experience in a virtual reality with a variety of options for action.

Graham Nelson (2001) counted Michael Crichton's Amazon and the adaptations of the science fiction classics Rendezvous with Rama and Fahrenheit 451 among the noteworthy games from the multitude of adventure titles that were published in the “golden age of text adventures” of the 1980s .

The involvement of writers in game development was already emphasized by William V. Costanzo (1989) as a special feature of Telarium. As examples he named Michael Crichton, who developed Amazon himself, as well as Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke, who licensed sequels to their books Fahrenheit 451 and Rendezvous with Rama .

Nick Montfort (2003), with the exception of Ray Bradbury, saw little evidence of active involvement of book authors in game development. However, compared with other companies, Telarium may have put the most effort into adapting well-known literary models for adventure.

Jimmy Maher (2006) came to a differentiated overall assessment of Telarium: The careful selection of the novel and the partly innovative interaction possibilities, for example in the adventure Perry Mason - The Case of the Mandarin Murder , were rated positively . On the other hand, the claim was often higher than what was ultimately realized ("Telarium's reach often exceeded its grasp"). The game play of the adventures is often lacking in flexibility, which is due on the one hand to the hardware restrictions at the time, but on the other hand to general structural problems of interactive fiction . Nevertheless, most of the Telarium adventures can be rated as good from today's perspective ("most of its games nevertheless stood up fairly well today").

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See legal capacity, structure and organs of a corporation under corporate law in the USA, for example. B. Andreas Spahlinger, Gerhard Wegen: International corporate law in practice . Munich 2005, ISBN 3-406-52621-7 (Chapter Corporation , Rn. 1302 - 1318).
  2. ↑ Cf. C. David Seuss: Welcome to Telarium , autumn 1984 (Telarium newsletter on the Manuel Schulz website: The Interactive Fiction Collector's Guide - Telarium) .
  3. ↑ See the information on the company website Northern Light - CEO C. David Seuss ( Memento of the original from March 5, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.northernlight.com
  4. ↑ See e.g. B. Phil Wiswell: Makers of Entertainment Software Shoot for New High Scores. Optimism grows in PCjr Sales. In: PC Magazine, Jan. 8, 1985, p. 52
  5. ↑ See Marguerite Zientara on the marketing strategy of Spinnaker Software: Inside Spinnaker Software. In: InfoWorld, Volume 6, Number 33, August 13, 1984. ISSN  0199-6649 . Pp. 43-48.
  6. ^ Bill Loguidice: Remarkable Auctions: Shadowkeep (1984) for the Apple II by Trillium on the Armchair Arcade website . Videogames and Computers .
  7. ↑ a b cf. Jimmy Maher: Let's Tell a Story Together. A History of Interactive Fiction . Senior Honor's Thesis, University of Texas, Dallas 2006 (Chapter 6 The Rest of commercial IF - Trillium / Telarium ).
  8. ↑ See Marguerite Zientara: Inside Spinnaker Software. In: InfoWorld, Volume 6, Number 33, August 13, 1984. ISSN  0199-6649 . P. 45 ("There's one sales call and one invoice").
  9. ↑ See Jimmy Maher: Let's Tell a Story Together. A History of Interactive Fiction . Senior Honor's Thesis, University of Texas, Dallas 2006 (Chapter 6 The Rest of commercial IF - Trillium / Telarium).
  10. ↑ See Jimmy Maher: Let's Tell a Story Together. A History of Interactive Fiction . Senior Honor's Thesis, University of Texas, Dallas 2006 (Chapter 7 The End of an Era ).
  11. ↑ See NN: Conglomerate will turn over $ 130 million. Softkey takes over two software houses with Spinnaker and Wordstar ( memento of the original from August 30, 2012 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. . In: Computerwoche of August 27, 1993; Robert F. Bruner: Deals from Hell. M & A Lessons that Rise Above the Ashes. John Wiley & Sons, New Jersey, USA 2005, p. 249 (chapter Mattel's Acquisition of The Learning Company ). @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.computerwoche.de
  12. ↑ See NN: Learning has snapped softkey after all  ( page can no longer be called up , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . In: Computerwoche from February 2, 1996; Robert F. Bruner: Deals from Hell. M & A Lessons that Rise Above the Ashes. John Wiley & Sons, New Jersey, USA 2005, p. 249 (chapter Mattel's Acquisition of The Learning Company ).@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / www.computerwoche.de  
  13. ↑ Cf. NN: Mattel swallows The Learning Company . In: Heise online from December 14, 1998; Robert F. Bruner: Deals from Hell. M & A Lessons that Rise Above the Ashes. John Wiley & Sons, New Jersey, USA 2005, p. 249 (chapter Mattel's Acquisition of The Learning Company ).
  14. ↑ See the information on the company website of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt ( Memento of the original from April 13, 2012 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. . @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.hmhco.com
  15. ↑ See Selby Bateman: Is A Picture Worth A Thousand Words? In: Compute !, Issue 53, October 1984, p. 32.
  16. ↑ See Sharon Darling: Byron Preiss and Ronald Martinez. Trillium Software Developers . In: Compute! S Gazette, Issue 18, December 1984, pp. 52-58 (54).
  17. ↑ See Shay Addams. If yr cmptr cn rd ths .. . In: Computer Entertainment, August 1985, pp. 24-27, 76-77.
  18. ↑ See Boris Schneider-Johne , Heinrich Lenhardt : Science Fiction Adventures . In: Happy Computer 5/1985, p. 147 and the website Hans Persson / Stefan Meier: Adventureland (Companies - Telarium Corporation) .
  19. ↑ See Sharon Darling: Byron Preiss and Ronald Martinez. Trillium Software Developers . In: Compute! S Gazette, Issue 18, December 1984, pp. 52-58 (53f.).
  20. ↑ See e.g. B. Boris Schneider-Johne , Heinrich Lenhardt : Science Fiction Adventures . In: Happy Computer 5/1985, pp. 145ff .; Gil Merciez: Fahrenheit 451 . In: Antic Amiga Magazine, Vol. 5 No. 1, 05/1985, p. 81
  21. ↑ Cf. Konrad Lischka: Where's the gasoline. The history of computer games from literature to sport and back again. In: Telepolis, January 28, 2001.
  22. ↑ See David Cuciz: Gamespy Interviews - Alan Dean Foster. The Writing Game, August 2000 ( Memento of the original from January 3, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / archive.gamespy.com
  23. ↑ Cf. Werner Faulstich: Of Trolls, Magicians, Power and Other Wondrous Adventures. Small introduction to interactive computer fairy tales . In: Journal for Literary Studies and Linguistics Volume 92 (1993), pp. 96–125 (S 97 fn. 7)
  24. ↑ Cf. Werner Faulstich: Of Trolls, Magicians, Power and Other Wondrous Adventures. Small introduction to interactive computer fairy tales . In: Journal for Literary Studies and Linguistics Volume 92 (1993), pp. 96–125 (p. 98)
  25. ↑ Cf. Werner Faulstich: Of Trolls, Magicians, Power and Other Wondrous Adventures. Small introduction to interactive computer fairy tales . In: Journal for Literary Studies and Linguistics Volume 92 (1993), pp. 96–125 (p. 114)
  26. ↑ Cf. Werner Faulstich: Of Trolls, Magicians, Power and Other Wondrous Adventures. Small introduction to interactive computer fairy tales . In: Journal for Literary Studies and Linguistics Volume 92 (1993), pp. 96–125 (p. 117)
  27. ↑ See Konrad Lischka: Playground Computer: Culture, History and Aesthetics of Computer Games . Verlag Heinz Heise 2002, p. 76; ders., Young technology with an old tradition. Reflections on the cultural history of computer games. Federal Agency for Civic Education, Bonn 2005 (Chapter Development - From Words to Images of Virtual Realities )
  28. ↑ See Graham Nelson: Inform Designer's Manual . Dan Sanderson, 4th ed. 2001, hardcover: ISBN 0-9713119-3-5 , paperback: ISBN 0-9713119-0-0 (§ 46: A brief history of interactive fiction online edition ).
  29. ↑ Cf. William V. Costanzo: The electronic Text: Learning to write, read and reason with computers . Educational Technology Publications 1989 (Chapter A brief History of Interactive Fiction , pp. 67f.).
  30. ↑ See Nick Montfort: Twisty Little Passages. An Approach to Interactive Fiction . The MIT Press 2003, ISBN 0-262-13436-5 , p. 172.