Pete Cooke‘s graphical text adventure, Urban Upstart, was first published by Richard Shepherd Software in 1983. It’s a first-person game, where you use a text parser to move around and issue commands, and is set in the fictional English town of “Scarthorpe” – a rough place to live, by all accounts. So rough, in fact, that the aim of the game is to escape the place by any means possible.
Tag Archives: text adventure
The Hobbit, PC
The 1983 MS-DOS version of Beam Software‘s classic text adventure, The Hobbit, allows you to choose between 40 or 80 column display for the text parser, and whether you want to play the game with pictures or not.
Frankenstein, Amstrad CPC
The Amstrad CPC version of Rod Pike‘s text adventure, Frankenstein, just about falls into the middle of the Commodore 64 and Spectrum versions.
Frankenstein, ZX Spectrum
CRL Group‘s 1987 release of Frankenstein is a text adventure based on Mary Shelley‘s infamous novel and takes a more serious approach than most other adaptations of the time.
Frankenstein, Commodore 64
CRL Group‘s 1987 release of Frankenstein was part of its text adventure series, based on classic horror stories including Dracula and The Wolfman (it also included Jack the Ripper, but that’s not a “classic horror story” – it is an exploitation of a series of real-life grisly murders perpetrated by an obscenely rich and demented Freemason, but I digress…).
Gremlins: The Adventure, ZX Spectrum
Gremlins: The Adventure is a text-based adventure, with graphics, based on the successful comedy horror film from 1984. It was first released in 1985 by Adventure International and was programmed by Brian Howarth with artwork by Teoman Irmak.
Sláine, Amstrad CPC
Developed by Creative Reality and published by Martech in 1987, Sláine is another attempt to bring a popular 2000AD comic character to life in a video game, and it is unfortunately another failed experiment.
Sláine, ZX Spectrum
Based on the 2000AD comic character of the same name, Sláine is an interactive action adventure game developed by Creative Reality and published by Martech in 1987.
Sláine, Commodore 64
Sláine is a real time, text-based adventure game featuring the popular 2000AD comic barbarian, and it was developed by Creative Reality and published by Martech in 1987.
The Lord of the Rings, ZX Spectrum
Developed by Beam Software and published by Melbourne House in 1986, The Lord of the Rings is a text adventure game made by essentially the same team who created the classic Spectrum text adventure, The Hobbit.
Was it the first official Lord of the Rings game ever made? Possibly. There were definitely many unofficial Lord of the Rings rip-off games on the market before this, but this is arguably the first properly-licensed Lord of the Rings game for home computers.
The King of Grabs 