MY EXPERIENCE WITH ADVENTURES (a personal account) By Colin "Bronco" Campbell The First Adventure =================== Everybody remembers their first attempt at playing an adventure game. I certainly do. My start to the gloriously rich world of adventuring was not the same as the average man in the street. I had to write the first adventure that I played. Let me explain: Way back in December 1983 I received my first computer - an Aquarius. Yes, I know. It wasn't very good (to say the least) but it did give me an excellent introduction to the hobby. Along with the machine I had a 16K memory cartridge ("16K wow! What a lot of memory it had!" I thought to myself) and a few books. One of the books was entitled "Write Your Own Adventure Programs For Your Microcomputer". I wonder if anybody reading this remembers it? Over the Christmas holidays I laboriously typed the program in and.... zap! I became an adventurer. Although the game I typed in wasn't very good, it did inspire me to buy some adventuring software for my new machine. First on the list was an "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons" cartridge. Now,this game was absolutely fantastic. It was in 3D and, I think, the forerunner to Dungeon Master that everybody loves today. In time, however, I got myself a new computer which I gradually upgraded. First I got a rubbery Spectrum 48k. It soon became a Spectrum +, and then metamorphosed into a Spectrum 128K. With these machines I set about tasting the world of adventures properly. "The Hobbit", it was called. I remember being overawed with the superb (in those days) graphics and the lovely characters wandering around on their own - just like a little world! I soon, however, became fed up with the graphics (they took simply a-g-e-s to appear) and text (there wasn't enough of it). I borrowed a friend's copy of "Kentilla" by Derek Brewster (remember him?) and played it to death. Next was "Microman", "Spiderman", "Sorcerer of Claymorgue Castle" and "Bored of The Rings". When I was playing these games I realised that the graphics were ruining them. It seemed to me that the software companies were more interested in how the game looked than how it played. I shall give you an example. The best adventure that I ever played on the "bog standard" Spectrum was one called "Out of The Shadows" from Mizar Games. Although the game was not what you'd expect to call an adventure in the classic sense (it was more of a role playing adventure) I loved it for its adventuring atmosphere. The idea of the game was that you moved your stick man through a multi-level dungeon to collect treasure, money, weapons etc. and kill as many monsters as you could get away with. The game's originality came from the fact that you could only see what the stick man could (i.e. trees would block out a certain line of sight, your lantern couldn't show everything up in the darkness of the dungeons). There is no way of describing the intense atmosphere created when you're on the 8th level on the dungeon, your torch is burning out and you can hear monsters moving around somewhere nearby.... This game, as fantastic as it was, never got released to a wide audience. No company wanted to touch it (despite it getting a Crash Smash). Well, I say no company wanted to touch it but I did manage to pick up a copy in a compilation entitled "Foremost Adventures". When do you ever see adventures in compilation packs on the shelves of WH Smith these days?? Write It Yourself ================= In 1986 I bought a copy of "The Quill" from my local Boots and it wasn't long before I wrote my first decent adventures. The first attempt produced "Skool Quest" - based, libellously, on people I knew at Secondary School. Then I wrote "Warp Factor 1" - a sci-fi adventure. When I upgraded (again) to the Spectrum 128K I purchased a copy of "PAW" which I used to turn out two excellent little adventures, namely "Mazra City - The Final Countdown" and "The Twilight of The Gods". Both games had over 100K of text and the odd graphic in places. Nobody really saw or played these games. All of my friends were utterly non-interested in adventures and preferred to waste their time playing the latest licensed games from Ocean or U.S. Gold. It was about 1989 when I bought my Atari ST. Now that was an impressive machine to me. For a start, it had a proper keyboard. And a disk drive! Along with the machine I got Dungeon Master. I was stunned, amazed, overawed, speechless etc.etc.etc. Now this was an adventure of epic proportions!! After a while I got round to looking for an adventure creator. I chose STAC for the only reason that no other adventure creator existed at that time for my machine. I got to writing the best game anybody had seen.... I am still writing it. When it is finished only 1 meg users will be able to play it and they will be hard pushed to find any more than 2 pictures in the whole game. Keep a look out in this magazine towards the end of 1991 when "Operation Blue Sunrise" is finally completed. It may be one of the last text-only adventures to appear! But What Is An Adventure? (The Author Rants and Raves) ========================= An adventure, in my mind, is 90% text. The only exception to this is Dungeon Master. An adventure without decent amounts of text is nothing more than a children's "ABC" picture book. "The Cat Sat On The Mat" is not my favourite style of writing. You may ask "Cannot we have lots of text and lots of pretty pictures with 16 bit machines?". The answer is "No!". What happens is that in order to sell the game the writers feel they have to bung in lots of colourful pictures. Then they squeeze down the amount of text in order to fit even more pictures in to make it even prettier! Even with today's machines with large memories the writers of games will always try and use as much memory as possible for pictures. The arguments against text adventures, given by software producers AND shop owners, is usually something along the lines of "Nobody wants to buy them!" and "You need pretty pictures to attract the punters' eyes." What I say is this: how do these people know that nobody wants to buy them if they have never given the games a proper showing. The only text adventures I ever saw were hidden under mounds of Space Invader clones! The argument about attracting the punters' eyes is redundant too due to the fact that the packages are what attracts the eyes - and nobody's eyes can be attracted to a brightly coloured text adventure box if it's not on display alongside Xenon 52 and Turrican 9! Give the people a chance to buy a text adventure, please! If these people do not wake up and realise that pictures do not tell a thousand words then adventuring, as we would like to see it (and as it should be seen), will no longer exist. This will be a very sad day. If you don't agree with what I have written then just stop and ask yourself this question: Would you rather play an Infocom game or some rubbishy piece of software from Ocean? The Future? =========== I expect that things will go along on the same lines as today. Text adventures will disappear and so will even the graphic and text adventures. They will be replaced by the "user-friendly" Sierra system. The world's only source of proper adventures will come from us, the public. It will be our task to see that the adventure genre is kept alive so that when the world gets fed up with Xenon clones, "user-friendly point and click" games and flight simulators at least the art of adventure writing will not have been forgotten. If anybody wishes to contact me to have a good ol' "rant 'n' rave" then please write to the following address:- Colin Campbell, 21 Aldbury Mews, London, N9 9JD Don't bother about enclosing a SAE (unless you feel like it). @~If you have a viewpoint on any aspect of adventuring that you'd @~like to put forward, please send it in. Some suggestions - text @~vs graphics, RPGs vs traditional adventures ....