[sldev] Inspiration from the mists of time.

[Alan Grimes]

I was thinking the other day about some of the box art on some of my 
early video games. Then I started thinking about the games themselves.

Back in those days, games were classified by the smallest machine they 
could run on. There were 256k games, 512k games, and later even 640k games.

Hero's Quest, later renamed due to a lawsuit to "Quest for Glory" (So 
you want to be a hero?) was one such game. -- A 3D animated adventure! =P

What is fascinating about it is that it wasn't a click-and-grunt game. 
(there was a click-and-grunt remake that couldn't hold a candle to the 
original)

You could walk around and look at things to an extent with the mouse but 
to do anything for real, you punched the space bar, which paused the 
game and brought up a *text entry box*. That was the primary means of 
controlling your d00d. You could enter just about any imperative 
sentence and there were roughly even odds that the game could parse your 
command and do something. Using this system, you could had access to 
nearly the whole spectrum of human action and expression. This allowed 
you not only to just talk to the NPCs, but actually interrogate them 
about specific subjects.

The game was really awesome, it had such a breadth of fantastic 
creatures that you've never seen anywhere else from purple sauruses, 
meepts (little fuzzballs with powerful arms/feet that lived in holes 
under stones), antwerps (blue gelatinous monsters), and more, not to 
mention one of the best "introductions" ever.

Ignoring the 2.5D, 4-bit vector graphics, the game had an engine that 
rightfully humiliate all more recent game designers. It's engine is more 
sophisticated and powerful than anything on the market today.

For example, for your morning workout, you could go to Goblin City and 
come across this mysterious moving bush. So you issued a command "murder 
bush". a goblin would step out and the fight would begin. As the game 
progressed more and more goblins would fight you until you were taking 
on 20 goblins in a row. =P Then you could go work the afternoon at the 
stables for your silver. The stables were in the castle, so to get in 
you had to tell Carl the guard to "open the gate" for you, there was 
also a master swordsman who could train you up if you were a fighter. -- 
there were three classes, fighter, mage and thief.


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