The story is barebones as well, locking you in a big mansion along with 7 other people, who all are there to hunt treasure, but start dropping off, one by one. And the parser isn't even very smart, so you need to work in order to guess which phrases Roberta wanted you to use to do things. When you look at Mystery House today, it doesn't look like much: crude wireframe graphics on a black background cover most of the screen and the game text is shown on the lower half with a parser. A game, that ended up selling around 80 000 copies worldwide during a time, when computer games still were in their infancy. She also did the QA for the game and so born the first-ever graphical adventure, released first for Apple II. So, as an after-work task, Ken programmed game tools and logic, which allowed Roberta to draw rudimentary graphics and write the text. She presented it to Ken, who wasn't that impressed by it until he realised Roberta wanted to up the ante by adding graphics to the game. But it didn't take long for her to notice, that the games were lacking, mainly in graphics and story.įor three weeks Roberta sat at their kitchen table, tending their two children and plotted out her very first game design, Mystery House. Roberta was thrilled by the game and as soon as she finished it, she played others like it, like the many text adventures published by Adventure International, a company of Scott and Alexis Adams. Ken called out to his wife, Roberta, to see what he had found and together they submerged into the world of a very first text adventure game, created way earlier in 1968. During this task, he also rummaged the mainframe in order to see what was there and he happened to stumble upon a program called Colossal Cave Adventure. In 1979 Ken Williams was programming an income tax program to a mainframe by using a teletype at his home. It was groundbreaking stuff and the release of this now pretty simple game gave birth to the first real juggernaut in computer games, Sierra On-Line, known then only as On-Line Systems. And not only did it have graphics, but it also had interactive graphics, where you could pick up an item in one room and proceed to drop the item to the next room, all of which would lead the said item to magically appear in the room you were in. It wasn't the first adventure game ever made, but it was the first one that had actual graphics. Hi-Res Adventure #1: Mystery House (1980), written and designed by Roberta and Ken Williams, published and developed by On-Line SystemsĪs far I know, thanks to MobyGames, the release of Mystery House happened on May 5th, 1980.
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