Trinity (computer game)
| Trinity | |
|---|---|
| Studio | Infocom |
| Publisher | Infocom |
| Senior Developer | Brian Moriarty |
| Erstveröffent- lichung |
1986 |
| platform | Amiga , Apple II , Atari ST , C128 , DOS , Mac OS |
| Game engine | Z-machine |
| genre | Text adventure |
| Game mode | Single player |
| control | keyboard |
| medium | diskette |
| language | English |
| copy protection | Enclosure referencing ("Feelies") |
Trinity is a computer game by the US company Infocom from 1986. It belongs to the genre of text adventures .
action
The action with science fiction and fantasy elements begins in London. The protagonist (who is controlled by the player), an American tourist, witnesses the beginning of a fictional third world war in which the city is destroyed by an atomic bomb attack. He can escape through a so-called "Dimension Door" that it via time travel leads to other places and at other times as well as events that are essential to the history of the atomic bomb. Eventually he arrives at the Trinity test (the first atomic bomb explosion in New Mexico in 1945 as part of the Manhattan Project ), which he has to sabotage.
At the end of the game, the protagonist learns that without his intervention, the explosion - unlike in the real Trinity test - would have destroyed large parts of New Mexico. Due to his intervention, the explosion then takes place without a time paradox , as historically handed down. In the following time the chain of events can take place that lead to the birth of the protagonist in the fictional game world and later to the outbreak of the third world war. The player is finally put back to the beginning of the game in London in a time loop .
Game principle and technology
Trinity is a text adventure, which means that the environment and events are displayed as screen text and the visualization is largely up to the player's imagination. The character is controlled via commands that the player enters using the keyboard and that are processed by a parser . The commands are in natural language and allow the game character to interact with his environment. The player can move through the game world, find objects, apply them to the environment or other objects and communicate with NPCs . As the story progresses, more locations in the game world will be unlocked.
Production notes
The game developer was Brian Moriarty . The adventure appeared in the "Infocom plus" series, which was only suitable for computers with at least 128 kB of memory due to the complex text parser and the detailed plot. The game was developed on the basis of the Z-machine ; the implementation took place for the C128 , DOS , Atari ST , Amiga , Mac OS and Apple II . The Trinity package insert includes the satirical comic The Illustrated Story of the Atom Bomb .
reception
In German game reviews of the 1980s, the very complex storyline, the excellent text parser (with a vocabulary of around 2000 words) and the vivid descriptions were emphasized. A test report rated Trinity 92 out of 100 points.
A study of computer game history and theory from 2006 named the adventure game, which was decisively shaped by its time of creation - the end of the Cold War - as one of the best in the entire history of Infocom (" Trinity , is considered by general consensus , along with A Mind Forever Voyaging , one of the company's two best. ").
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ See Boris Schneider-Johne : Trinity . In: Happy Computer , special games issue 11 (1986); Heinrich Lenhardt : Infocom's hat trick . In: Happy Computer 8/1986, p. 145.
- ↑ 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 - Infocom's finest hour: Trinity ) .