The Witness

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The Witness
Studio Infocom
Publisher Infocom
Senior Developer Stuart Galley
Erstveröffent-
lichung		 1983
platform Apple II , Atari-8-Bit , Atari ST , Commodore 64 , Commodore Amiga , DOS , Mac OS , Schneider CPC , TI-99 / 4A , TRS-80
Game engine Z-machine
genre Text adventure
Game mode Single player
control keyboard
language English
copy protection Enclosure referencing

The Witness is a computer game by the US company Infocom from 1983. It belongs to the genre of text adventures ( interactive fiction ).

action

The plot in the style of a crime story takes place in Los Angeles in 1938. The millionaire Freemann Linder had asked the police for protection from a man named Stiles. Stiles had an affair with Linder's wife, who committed suicide after the affair was discovered. The player character, a police investigator, is supposed to investigate and one evening he visits Linder's villa, where he is killed by an explosion in front of the player. The player is the only witness (English witness ) of murder and has to find the killer until sunrise time. The perpetrator must be among the four people who were present on the property at the time of the crime. As it gradually turns out, all four had a motive for the act. Supported by Sergeant Duffy, the player must question suspects and investigate motives for murder and murder opportunities before the perpetrator can be convicted.

Game principle and technology

The Witness is controlled via keyboard. The player enters single English words as well as complex sentences into a text parser . He gathers pieces of evidence at different locations and questions other characters. The adventure can be solved within a time limit. The package insert for the game contains several items that contain information about the solution to the game, for example a telegram from Freemann Linder and a newspaper article about him.

Production notes

The technical development basis of the text adventure without graphics and sound is the Z-machine . The game was implemented for the C 64 , DOS , Atari-8-Bit , Atari ST , Amiga , TRS-80 CoCo , TI-99 / 4A , Mac OS and Apple II . It is based on an idea by Marc Blank and Dave Lebling and was developed by Stuart Galley .

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

reception

The Happy Computer praised the excellent descriptive texts and a varied and interesting gameplay, but criticized waits until certain events in the game arrives. A study on computer game history and theory from 2006 differentiated: On the one hand, the independent actions of the non-player characters should be assessed positively. On the other hand, it is often very difficult for the player himself to be in the right place at the right time, e.g. B. to come closer to the game solution by interviewing a non-player character. The limited dialog options for non-player characters were also problematic due to hardware restrictions in the 1980s. The British magazine Computer & Video Games criticized the fact that the game was too easy to solve in less than two hours thanks to a built-in help function in the form of the assistant Duffy.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Overview of development and production under The Witness at MobyGames (English)
  2. ↑ For the author Stu Galley see z. B. Infocoms "The Witness Instruction Manual" for the C 64 , page 24 (English)
  3. ↑ GitHub.com: The Witness, by Stu Galley (Infocom). Retrieved April 18, 2019 .
  4. ↑ Happy Computer special issue 1/1985, p. 39: Witness / Suspect / Deadline. Retrieved October 24, 2016 .
  5. ↑ See Jimmy Maher: Let's Tell a Story Together. A History of Interactive Fiction . Senior Honor's Thesis, University of Texas, Dallas 2006 (Chapter 5 The Infocom Canon - The Early Mysteries: Deadline, The Witness, and Suspect ) .
  6. ^ Paul Coppins, Steve Donoghue: The Witness . In: Computer & Video Games . No. 43, May 1985, p. 112.