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This month's article is another interview,
about retro text adventures in German! But who could our guest be? Read
on! 😁
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My news
You might not be aware of it, but I write more than text adventures!
Although it is my first love, and I don't see myself even leaving the
genre, I also write other kinds of narrative games, and I offer my
services as a contract writer / narrative designer. Last year, I wrote
two games in the "visual novel" format for a mobile application, a
"serious game" to teach graduate students about the scientific method
and epistemology for a college in Montréal, and a tabletop RPG for a
Twitch show produced by Arte, the European TV channel!
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So if you happen to hear about anyone who
would be looking for a freelance video game writer, don't hesitate to
talk to them about me and point them to my website
🙂 Thank you in advance! And don't worry: no matter what, I'll still
start writing a text adventure this year, stay tuned for the
announcement 😉
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Community news
Retro text adventures never sleep! Here are some things that were on my radar this month:
- Planetasinclair
has recently recovered dozens of Spectrum games that had not been made
available online before, which is exciting! This includes some games by
Tim Gilberts, and a few text adventures - A Promotional Prospect, Harriet's Last Bath, Dark Tower of Engor, and many, many more! Head over to the blog (in Portuguese) to find out more!
- A new text adventure has been published for MSX2 computers: La Sorpresa. It looks spooky!!
- Jim Gerrie has completed a port to the MC-10 of the very first game inspired by Hitchhiker's Guide to Galaxy, from 1980. It is playable online here ("HITCHIK"); Jason Dyer has additional details and a writeup of the game if you are interested.
- Another demake: Invincible Island, a ZX Spectrum game, has been ported to ZX81, and can be downloaded here! Its author (who released All Hallows' Eve for the 48K ZX Spectrum last year) has developed a custom game engine targeting the ZX81 for this, MATE.
- Planetasinclair held its games of the year 2021 awards recently, and in the "text adventure" category, Saboteur: Deep Cover won, with Silk Dust taking second place! Congrats to all!
- Lost Wurld
seems like an interesting new engine for creating graphical text
adventures for the ZX Spectrum. Very much early stages of development,
as the author is working on their first game, but it deserves a shout
out nonetheless!
- Brett
Norris is awesome, part 2! Following last month's article, in which I
looked at the text of a bunch of Quilled and Pawed games, he alerted me
to a tool that might be able to handle ".tzx" files, which were numerous
but for which I couldn't find a solution. This tool is part of the
"tzxtools" python package, by "shred", and is called "tzxtap". Using
this tool, I was able to deal with many more games - in fact, over twice
as many! I ran a few statistics just to see, but the percentages didn't
vary wildly. If anyone is curious and would like me to re-run some
statistics, let me know!
- And part 3: Brett Norris also made his own "tzx2sna" Python script, which is available on his website!
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This month's article
This month, we get to learn more about the history of German text
adventures, through an interview with Stefan Vogt! Stefan is an
accomplished author and archivist, and I've talked about his projects
more than once in this newsletter! Find him on Twitter, and consider buying the physical edition of his latest game, Hibernated 1: Director's Cut!
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See you soon!
And that's a wrap on another edition of this newsletter! See you March 10th for more exciting content on retro text adventures!
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