Older gamers I need your help!

pfft i remember those games on the ancient spectrum , c64 that had no graphics and were just all text adventure games :P they were probably the first type of game to tell a story
 
wozzizname said:
I remember playing a game called The Hobbit back on my old Spectrum 48k - I've just looked it up on Wiki and it seems that it was quite an influential title.
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The book was very influential. The game, however, was not. It was rubbish.

If you really want text adventures you have to look at Infocom as they had some crackers (Zork, Planetfall, Fish, Murder, Deja Vu, etc).

You could have a look at Dragonlance: War Of The Lance on both the C64 / Amiga. This had an actual book with it and went on to become a very popular series selling millions (and probably my all time favourite series of books ever).

Just because a game was not text though didn't mean it didn't have a story. The story was all you really had on the 8-bits that set the atmosphere when you were coming home on the bus with your new game. It either made you think 'why the hell have I bought this' or 'can't wait to play this'.



M.
 
I think before graphics I would certainly look at the old text based games.

Quite a few of them read like an interactive book. Although at the time the games industry was predominately programmers doing everything hence the complexity grew once the programmers just programmed and the writers took the plot lines.

My Google-fu has come up with a book called "Twisty Little Passages" by Nick Montfort which looks at text based games.

You'll need to look at Acheton which ran on the Cambridge Mainframe.

Games that stood out from my days on the BBC Micro model B:

1. Level 9 (text based games company) "Snowball" (some of the games)
2. Acornsoft's original Elite - because the game came with a book that explained the story.

Later on other platforms:
1. Wing Commander
2. Sam & Max
3. Simon the Sourcerer
 
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Possibly the most innfluencial game for me was Xenon by bitmap brothers, I really got addicted to that. Story was simple, there was no story. You could change between a ground tank and a flyer by pressing the spacebar and you basically ensured your survival by killing everything else. It was Space Invaders on steroids. Actually Space Invaders was another game I got addicted to on the Atari 2600.

A game with a good story that I got heavily addicted to was Shadowrun on the SNES. You played a guy who woke up with amnesia after being almost murdered and you have to retrace your steps and work out what happened, whodunnit etc. Awesome awesome game, fair to say they dont make em like that anymore.
 
Have you looked at the "colossal cave adventure". This was running on mainframes and minis before home computers took off in any kind of serious way. I think it is actually still available on the web somewhere as a pc download. It is obviously a text based adventure and is the grandaddy of them all.

I had a ZX81 and a dragaon 32/dragon 64 before I got into PC gaming at home. My memory of the games on these machines is a bit dim I'm afraid.

Look at what was happening in the US in the early days - they had machines like the TRS80 in the late '70s and early '80s - very similar to the dragon and based on the 6809 chip (the trs80 games and cartridges would actually run on the dragon after a fashion). The US market was ahead of the UK market and the products were much slicker and better presented.

In the early days of the PC in the home the company INFOCOM was a major name. To my eternal regret I gave a load of INFOCOM games away years ago. They are mostly text based games but I have a memory of one game where you you were a consciousness in a space station which was in trouble. You played the game through text on the pc screen in conjunction with a board and little counters for the things in the game. Your body and senses were robots with which your consciousness could communicate but the robots were specialised and could only respond to you in their terms - some had audio sensors, some had radiation sensors, some had radio senors, some had visual sensors, some were heavy engineering, some were fine micro-manipulating types, and as the story progressed you had to achieve various results with various appropriate robots. Edit: I just checked wiki which has a lot on INFOCOM and its products. The game I was going on about above was called "Suspended". I am gutted to discover that the box for this game is now a collector's item. It had a plastic three dimensional almost life sized face coming out of the front of the box. The eyes were cut out, and behind them printed internally withing the game packaging were a set of piercing staring scary eyes. The whole effect was most disturbing.

There was so much innovation and experimentation in gaming in those days as the pioneers basically invented an industry.

Unlike the sad stale derivative boring gaming landscape we have now driven by unadventurous big business:(
 
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Elite.

Although the game was completely open ended and you made your own story up as it were, the original BBC version came with a novel called "The Dark Wheel" which pretty much set the scene for the kind of universe you were playing in.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Wheel

http://www.iancgbell.clara.net/elite/dkwheel.htm

The early RPG's such as the Bard's Tale series and AD&D SSI Gold Box series (Pool of Radiance, Curse of the Azure Bonds, Secret of the Silver Blades and Pools of Darkness) were pretty good as far as stories go if I recall correctly. With the 4 gold box games you could take your party from level 1 to level 40+ by importing them into the next in the series, so it acted as one big story. I think the Kain series is really worth looking at as far as story telling goes, with the original Blood Omen : Legacy of Kain having a great story. I think it was released 1995.
 
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m4cc45 said:
Well going back even further in the days of the Spectrum, C64 and Amiga the games, for me, had to have a good story. Some were very basic like Treasure Island Dizzy (getting shipwrecked and trapped on a Treasure Island and having to escape) to Dungeon Master where they wrote 30 pages in the manual about what happened and then continued this theme into Chaos Strikes Back.

Nowadays and I class Half Life amongst them - it's a very basic storyline. Aliens invade you are the only person who can stop them, yadda yadda. It's nothing inspiring there. Galdregons Domain, BAT, Hunter, Monkey Island, Captive, Supremacy, The Last Ninja, Infiltrator, Legend of Valour, Spellbound, Bloodwych, Robin of the Wood, etc. all had very good stories and had some very nice instruction books. They made you think that when you were playing the game you were making a difference and affecting something rather than just being along for the ride.




M.
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i agree,i remember all those games you mentioned very fondly...i think my first video game i played was either space invaders or Battlezone around 1980(im 34 years old)
 
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7th guest - 1 of the first cdrom only games, used 3d graphics and full motion video to tell the story amazing gfx for 1993

doom - ok maybe not for evolution of storytelling but for games as a whole

and another vote for monkey island.
 
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My god you havnt thought of broken sword! All of the classic point and clicks were all about gaming through a story! :D (i still love cracking them out every so often and having a go).

For a much more recent one try shadow of memories.
 
Another classic that I don't think anyone has mentioned is Dune II.

This game was the PC precursor to most of the RTS games where a story is developed as you play through a series of missions.

It spawned the Command and Conquer series for instance.
 
New Zealand Story :D

Clues in the title...

"The player controls a sneaker-wearing kiwi called Tiki, and the aim of the game is to rescue several of his kiwi chick friends who have been kiwi-napped by a leopard seal. The player has to navigate a scrolling maze-like level, at the end of which they release a kiwi trapped in a cage."

not sure how much more of a story you need than that!

Seriously though - Deus Ex deserves a mention. Probably the first game to really build on the foundation that Half Life laid out.

Hmm just stumbled across this...

http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20061103/quantum_01.shtml

might be of some use.

Dune was quite a good story - which led to the backstory for Dune 2 which was the birth of RTS genre. Obviously it was based on a book so not sure if that counts as developing a storyline in a game!
 
EffBee said:
Another classic that I don't think anyone has mentioned is Dune II.

This game was the PC precursor to most of the RTS games where a story is developed as you play through a series of missions.

It spawned the Command and Conquer series for instance.
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I can't believe I forgot that one! Not only did it spawn the RTS genre more or less, it also was also obviously the first one to progress the story with short missions linked with a strong story line taken from a best selling book
 
My era goes back to dizzy on the amiga, monkey island, dune & another world.

I'm not doing your homework for you, but you can research these and what others have suggested.
 
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