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.

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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…).

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Hunchback: The Adventure, ZX Spectrum

Rather than produce another platform game, Ocean Software chose to make a graphical adventure for their third Hunchback game. Which was an unusual choice.

Hunchback: The Adventure again features Quasimodo trying to rescue Esmeralda, this time from the evil Cardinal of Notre Dame. It’s a three-part game, requiring the same number of loads. In part one Quasimodo must escape from Notre Dame itself, and from the Cardinal’s many guards who are trying to stop him. In part two he must make his way under the city of Paris until he reaches the Cardinal’s mansion. And finally, in part three, he must challenge the Cardinal and escape with Esmeralda in tow.

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