Chris Curry and Hermann Hauser made the most of the connections Hauser had formed there during the years he spent as a Cambridge PhD candidate. They considered Cambridge something of a secret weapon for Acorn, taking the university itself into their confidence and making it almost a business partner. Clive Sinclair, meanwhile, who like Chris Curry had not attended university, displayed only a grudging respect for the Cambridge talent, mingled with occasional expressions of contempt that rather smack of insecurity.
Acorn Computers had helped one David Johnson-Davis to set up a software publisher specializing in software for their first popular machine, the Atom, in Now, as the BBC Micro neared launch, Acornsoft would prove to be a valuable tool to advance the goal of making as much software as possible, and hopefully of as high a quality as possible, available for the new machine.
They offered prospective programmers a brand new BBC Micro of their own as a sort of signing bonus upon acceptance of a program. After a friend got a statistics package accepted, Peter Killworth started to ponder whether he had something to give them; naturally, his thoughts turned to Brand X.
He rewrote the game in the relatively advanced BBC BASIC, using every technique he could devise to save memory and, when that failed, simply jettisoning much of the original.
It was published in mid, the first game in the Acornsoft line. Killworth hoped it would sell at least copies or so and earn him a little bit of extra pocket money; in the end it sold more than 20, An unabashed treasure hunt with no pretensions toward narrative or mimesis, its geography simply serves as the intellectual landscape to house its puzzles.
While not huge, the game is amazingly large given the memory restrictions under which Killworth was operating and the fact that he was working in BASIC.
He was already an experienced programmer of weather and ocean simulations thanks to his day job, and his expertise comes through here. The puzzles are a mixed bag, sometimes brilliant but always heartless.
You start in a store from which you can only remove two out of four items. Still, some of the puzzles border on the beautiful, including one of my favorite guess-the-verb puzzles of all time.
I rather like it when a game sends me scurrying to the Internet in search of outside knowledge to apply. And I feel really special when, as in this case, I already have the knowledge I need. Other puzzles, however, are cheap and unforgivable in that way all too typical of early text adventures. The deaths are so numerous and so absurd that they almost come off as parody. Unsurprisingly, it and the other Phoenix games are very polarizing these days.
Graham Nelson among others remains a big fan, while still others find them an exercise in masochism; see this old newsgroup thread for a sample of typical reactions. Already by he was earning twice as much from his games as he did from his Cambridge professorship. Adams III , a full eight hours to solve the game. Killworth also authored one of the classics of the sub-genre of adventure-authoring guides that were popular in the early and mids, the aptly titled How to Write Adventure Games.
He died in of motor neuron disease. Even when he was earning more from his adventures than he was from his day job, games were just a sideline to a significant career in oceanographic research. Most of the original incarnations of the Phoenix games, Brand X included, have been ported to Z-Code format , playable in my own Filfre and countless other interpreters, thanks to a preservation effort led by Graham Nelson, Adam Atkinson, and David Kinder following the final shutdown of Phoenix in Tags: bbc micro , philosopher's quest , topologika.
RIP, Peter Killworth! I was very sad to learn of his passing the other year. It is great to hear more about him, and I look forward to the write-up on his later games.
Thanks for this post. I was not familiar with Acheton and the Acornsoft connection. Good stuff, —Zack. Howard Lewis Ship. Thanks for posting. Happened to be Googling my Dad tonight and found this. Thanks for commenting! It always makes me happy to hear from the people who were actually players in these little dramas I describe. Peter was always very proud of those games and would have enjoyed reading this.
They are very much part of our family history, and still have some of the original pencil and paper notes. If his old files are still available, I, for one, would greatly appreciate if they were passed along to someone who could compile and release the fixed version the chopped text happens at a fairly important scene.
Not wanting to be crass about their loss, I left the family alone after that…. I had the pleasure of corresponding with Peter when I was a student.
A definite hero of mine. These games form the interior decoration to much of my mind. Lovely to stumble upon this article. Mike Taylor. I loved reading this.
David Boddie. There is a brief discussion of the Acornsoft and earlier adventures in the questions at the end of this presentation by Jon Thackray. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
If you value this blog, please think about supporting it by becoming a Patreon patron or via a one-time PayPal donation. Proudly powered by WordPress Theme: Choco by. Phoenix and Acornsoft 07 Nov. However, not all the Phoenix games had a Topologika release, nor vice versa. Under the long shadow of Acheton , the Phoenix games tend to be large cave exploration games with treasures in the traditional style, with well over rooms each Sangraal has and Fyleet is not far behind.
As was normal in games of the period, they have a two-word parser, but it is a good one, supporting take all and drop all. Rather than re-implementing the design in a modern system, we used a translator a Perl script called Phoenix to compile these games directly from their original source code into Z-machine assembly language, which supplemented with a small routine library was then compiled by Inform into story files.
They do not include the Inform library, and so don't have the Inform world model or parser -- instead they have the original, two-word parser and include their own implementations of standard actions. If our restorations work properly, all responses and messages are identical to the originals with only tiny exceptions, e.
Graham Nelson who wrote the translator program Adam Atkinson who tested and restored source code Gunther Schmidl who sought and cleared rights to the code. Partington Download The first of a loose trilogy of cave games which can be played in any order by Jonathan R. You are in the ruins of the ancient fortress of Fyleet. Around you lies a thick pine forest, which appears to have been cleared a bit to your west; there are also paths to the east and north, while to the south some steps lead down into the ground.
Eventually you come out into a small room. You are in a small square room. Light streams in from an archway to the south. There are steps leading up to the north, and a closed door to the east. There is a bullseye lantern here, which is off. There is a piano-accordion here. There is an empty bottle here.
0コメント