Mystery House

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Mystery House
On-Line Systems-01-Mystery House.jpg
1982 re-release cover art
Developer(s) On-Line Systems
Publisher(s) On-Line Systems
Designer(s) Roberta Williams
Programmer(s) Ken Williams
Series Hi-Res Adventures
Engine ADL
Platform(s) Apple II
ReleaseMay 5, 1980
Genre(s) Adventure
Mode(s) Single-player

Mystery House is an adventure game released by On-Line Systems in 1980. It was designed, written and illustrated by Roberta Williams, and programmed by Ken Williams for the Apple II. [1] Mystery House is the first graphical adventure game and the first game produced by On-Line Systems, the company which would evolve into Sierra On-Line. [2] It is one of the earliest horror video games. [3]

Contents

Plot

The opening scene Mystery House - Apple II render emulation - 2.png
The opening scene

The game starts near an abandoned Victorian mansion. The player is soon locked inside the house with no other option than to explore. The mansion contains many interesting rooms and seven other people: Tom, a plumber; Sam, a mechanic; Sally, a seamstress; Dr. Green, a surgeon; Joe, a grave-digger; Bill, a butcher; Daisy, a cook.

Initially, the player has to search the house in order to find a hidden cache of jewels. Soon, dead bodies (of the other people) begin appearing and it is obvious there is a murderer on the loose in the house. The player must discover who it is or become the next victim.

Development and release

At the end of the 1970s, Ken Williams sought to set up a company for enterprise software for the market-dominating Apple II computer. One day, he took a teletype terminal to his house to work on the development of an accounting program. Looking through a catalog, he found a game called Colossal Cave Adventure . He bought the game and introduced it to his wife, Roberta, and they both played through it. They began to search for something similar but found the market underdeveloped. Roberta decided that she could write her own, and conceived of the plot for Mystery House, taking inspiration from Agatha Christie's novel And Then There Were None . [4] [5] She was also inspired by the board game Clue , which helped to break her out from a linear structure to the game. [6]

Advertisement from the June 1981 issue of The On-Line Letter for some of On-Line Systems' Hi-Res Adventure games, including Mystery House On-Line Systems - Hi-Res Adventure - June 1981 The On-Line Letter advert.jpg
Advertisement from the June 1981 issue of The On-Line Letter for some of On-Line Systems' Hi-Res Adventure games, including Mystery House

Recognizing that though she knew some programming, she needed someone else to code the game, she convinced her husband to help her. Ken agreed and borrowed his brother's Apple II computer to write the game on. Ken suggested that adding graphical scenes to the otherwise text-based game would make it more interesting for players, and the couple bought a VersaWriter machine, on which users can trace over a line drawing and convert it to a digital drawing. Roberta drew seventy scenes for the game. Ken found, however, that the resulting digital drawings were too large to fit into a 5¼-inch floppy disk, so he devised a way to convert the images into coordinates and instructions for the program to redraw the lines of the scenes rather than static images, as well as writing a better version of the VersaWriter scanning software. The resulting game is a text-based adventure with a depiction of the character's location displayed above the text. The game's code was completed in only a few days, and was finished on May 5, 1980. The couple took out an advertisement in Micro magazine as On-Line Systems, and mass-produced Ziploc bags containing a floppy disk and a sheet of instructions, to be sold at US$24.95(equivalent to $88.61 in 2022). [4] [7]

Reception and legacy

To the Williamses' surprise, what Roberta had initially considered a hobby project sold more than 10,000 copies through mail-order. [8] [4] [9] Including its 1982 rerelease through the SierraVenture line, 80,000 units were eventually sold worldwide, [10] making it one of the best-selling computer games at the time.[ citation needed ]

Mark Marlow reviewed Mission: Asteroid, Mystery House, and The Wizard and the Princess for Computer Gaming World , and stated that "Mystery House is considerably more difficult and provides many traps for the unwary in a wonderfully Victorian setting." [11]

Computer Gaming World in 1996 ranked it fourth on the magazine's list of the most innovative computer games. [12] GamePro named Mystery House the 51st most important game of all time in 2007, for introducing a visual component to adventure games and for featuring graphics at a time when most computer games did not. [13] Though the game is often considered the first adventure game to use graphics, dungeon crawl role-playing video games such as pedit5 (1975) had already been using graphics prior to its release. Applying graphics to an adventure game, however, was unprecedented as previous story-based adventure games were entirely text-based.

Mystery House's success led the Williams to create the Hi-Res Adventures series, and note the game as Hi-Res Adventure #1. After the follow-on success of their next game, Wizard and the Princess , the pair moved into game development full-time, and On-Line Systems was incorporated in 1980 as Sierra On-Line. [4] The game was later released into the public domain in 1987 as part of Sierra's seventh anniversary celebration. [14] [15]

In Japan, several different adventure games under the title Mystery House were released. In 1982, MicroCabin released Mystery House, which was unrelated to (but inspired by) the On-Line Systems game of the same name. The following year, the Japanese company Starcraft released an enhanced remake of On-Line Systems' Mystery House with more realistic art work and depiction of blood, for the NEC PC-6001 and PC-8801, while Mystery House II for the MSX was released as a sequel to MicroCabin's Mystery House. [16] The Japanese versions of Mystery House had sales of 50,000 units, including 30,000 copies on the MSX and 20,000 copies on the PC-6001, PC-8001, PC-8801, PC-9801, FM-7, and X1 computers. [17]

Mystery House was satirized in the 1982 adventure game Prisoner 2 . One location from that game is a spooky house, where the player is told, "He's killed Ken!" and must seek absolution for murder. Elements from the game were later reintroduced in the Sierra On-Line game The Colonel's Bequest in 1989.

Related Research Articles

Sierra Entertainment, Inc. was an American video game developer and publisher founded in 1979 by Ken and Roberta Williams. The company is known for pioneering the graphic adventure game genre, including the first such game, Mystery House. It is known for its graphical adventure game series King's Quest, Space Quest, Police Quest, Gabriel Knight, Leisure Suit Larry, and Quest for Glory, and as the original publisher of Valve's Half-Life series.

<i>Colossal Cave Adventure</i> 1976 video game

Colossal Cave Adventure is a text-based adventure game, released in 1976 by developer Will Crowther for the PDP-10 mainframe computer. It was expanded upon in 1977 by Don Woods. In the game, the player explores a cave system rumored to be filled with treasure and gold. The game is composed of dozens of locations, and the player moves between these locations and interacts with objects in them by typing one- or two-word commands which are interpreted by the game's natural language input system. The program acts as a narrator, describing the player's location and the results of the player's attempted actions. It is the first well-known example of interactive fiction, as well as the first well-known adventure game, for which it was also the namesake.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Roberta Williams</span> American video game designer (born 1953)

Roberta Lynn Williams is an American video game designer and writer, who co-founded Sierra On-Line with her husband, game developer Ken Williams. In 1980, her first game, Mystery House, became a modest commercial success; it is credited as the first graphic adventure game. She is also known for creating and maintaining the King's Quest series, as well as designing the full motion video game Phantasmagoria in 1995.

The Adventure Game Interpreter (AGI) is a game engine developed by Sierra On-Line. The company originally developed the engine for King's Quest (1984), an adventure game that Sierra and IBM wished to market in order to attract consumers to IBM's lower-cost home computer, the IBM PCjr.

<i>Time Zone</i> (video game) 1982 video game

Time Zone is a multi-disk graphical adventure game written and directed by Roberta Williams for the Apple II. Developed in 1981 and released in 1982 by On-Line Systems, the game was shipped with six double-sided floppy disks and contained 1,500 areas (screens) to explore along with 39 scenarios to solve. Produced at a time when most games rarely took up more than one side of a floppy, Time Zone is one of the first games of this magnitude released for home computer systems. Ports were released for Japanese home computers PC-88, PC-98 and FM-7 in 1985.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">PC-8800 series</span> Series of computers sold in Japan by NEC

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<i>Softporn Adventure</i> 1981 video game

Softporn Adventure is a comedic, adult-oriented text adventure game produced for the Apple II in 1981. The game was created by Charles Benton and released by On-Line Systems, later renamed Sierra On-Line. Years later, Softporn Adventure was remade and expanded as Leisure Suit Larry series of adult-oriented video games, and the first entry in that series, 1987's Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards, was a nearly direct graphical adaptation of Softporn Adventure. Another graphical version was released as Las Vegas for various Japanese computers in 1986 by Starcraft.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ken Williams (game developer)</span> American video game programmer

Kenneth A. Williams is an American businessman and game programmer who co-founded On-Line Systems together with his wife Roberta Williams. On-Line Systems eventually became Sierra On-Line and was ultimately renamed Sierra Entertainment. The couple were leading figures in the development of graphical adventure games. At its height, Sierra employed nearly 1,000 people prior to its acquisition in 1996.

<i>Kings Quest I</i> 1984 video game

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<i>Kings Quest III</i> 1986 video game

King's Quest III: To Heir Is Human is the third installment in the King's Quest series of graphic adventure games developed and released by Sierra On-Line in 1986. The game was originally released for the Apple II and PC DOS, and later ported to several other computer systems. It was the first title game in the series not to feature King Graham as the player character.

<i>Phantasmagoria</i> (video game) 1995 video game

Phantasmagoria is a point-and-click adventure horror video game designed by Roberta Williams for MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows and released by Sierra On-Line on August 24, 1995. It tells the story of Adrienne Delaney, a writer who moves into a remote mansion and finds herself terrorized by supernatural forces. It was made at the peak of popularity for interactive movie games and features live-action actors and footage, both during cinematic scenes and within the three-dimensionally rendered environments of the game itself. It was noted for its violence and sexual content.

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<i>Mickeys Space Adventure</i> 1984 video game

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<i>Princess Tomato in the Salad Kingdom</i> 1984 video game

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<i>Hydlide</i> 1984 video game

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<i>Wizard and the Princess</i> 1980 video game

Wizard and the Princess is a graphic adventure game written for the Apple II and published in 1980 by On-Line Systems. It was the second title released in the Hi-Res Adventures series after Mystery House. While Mystery House used monochrome drawings, Wizard and the Princess added color. Ports for the Atari 8-bit family and Commodore 64 were released in 1982 and 1984 respectively. The 1982 self-booting version for IBM PC compatibles was renamed Adventure in Serenia.

<i>Mission Asteroid</i> 1980 video game

Mission Asteroid is a graphic adventure game for the Apple II written by Ken and Roberta Williams and released in 1980 by On-Line Systems.

An adventure game is a video game genre in which the player assumes the role of a protagonist in an interactive story, driven by exploration and/or puzzle-solving. The genre's focus on story allows it to draw heavily from other narrative-based media, such as literature and film, encompassing a wide variety of genres. Most adventure games are designed for a single player, since the emphasis on story and character makes multiplayer design difficult. Colossal Cave Adventure is identified by Rick Adams as the first such adventure game, first released in 1976, while other notable adventure game series include Zork, King's Quest, Monkey Island, Syberia, and Myst.

References

  1. ↑ Williams, Ken. "Introduction to The Roberta Williams Anthology". The Sierra Help Pages. Retrieved January 12, 2015.
  2. ↑ McGuinn, Sherry (November 20, 1988). "Mom goes on-line with adventurous computer games". Chicago Sun-Times . Archived from the original on April 2, 2015. Retrieved March 17, 2015.
  3. ↑ Rouse III, Richard (2009). "Match Made in Hell: The Inevitable Success of the Horror Genre in Video Games". In Perron, B. (ed.). Horror in Video Games: Essays on the Fusion of Fear and Play. McFarland. p. 15. ISBN   978-0-7864547-9-2. The horror games kept going from [Zork], from one of the first graphical adventures Mystery House...
  4. 1 2 3 4 Craddock, David L. (September 17, 2017). "1: Interactive Page-Turners". Once Upon a Point and Click.
  5. ↑ Nooney, Laine (2017). "Let's Begin Again: Sierra On-Line and the Origins of the Graphical Adventure Game". American Journal of Play. 10 (1): 71–98.
  6. ↑ DeMaria, Rusel; Wilson, Johnny L. (2003). High Score!: The Illustrated History of Electronic Games (2 ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill/Osborne. pp. 134–135. ISBN   0-07-223172-6.
  7. ↑ Maher, Jimmy. "Mystery House, Part 1". The Digital Antiquarian. Retrieved September 5, 2019.
  8. ↑ Lynch, Dennis (May 26, 1989). "Sierra disks offer epic adventures". Chicago Tribune . p. 170. Retrieved December 21, 2021– via Newspapers.com.
  9. ↑ Bendner, Michael (September 1995). "An Interview with Ken Williams". Archived from the original on December 6, 1998. Retrieved August 23, 2023.
  10. ↑ DeMaria, Rusel; Wilson, Johnny L. (2003). High Score!: The Illustrated History of Electronic Games (2. ed.). New York [u.a.]: McGraw-Hill/Osborne. p. 135. ISBN   0-07-223172-6.
  11. ↑ Marlow, Mark (January–February 1982). "Micro - Reviews". Computer Gaming World. Vol. 1, no. 2. pp. 31–32.
  12. ↑ "The 15 Most Innovative Computer Games". Computer Gaming World. November 1996. p. 102. Retrieved March 25, 2016.
  13. ↑ "The 52 Most Important Video Games of All Time". GamePro . April 24, 2007. Archived from the original on May 20, 2007. Retrieved April 25, 2007.
  14. ↑ "1980 Adventure 'Mystery House' Comes to the iPhone". TouchArcade.com. December 6, 2013. Retrieved August 7, 2016.
  15. ↑ "Mystery House review". AdventureGamers.com. October 7, 2005. Retrieved August 7, 2016.
  16. ↑ Kalata, Kurt (May 10, 2010). "The Mystery of the Japanese Mystery House". Hardcore Gaming 101. Retrieved September 19, 2011.
  17. ↑ "ミステリーハウスの部屋". Homepage2.nifty.com. Retrieved January 12, 2015.[ permanent dead link ] (Translation)
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