The Count (video game)

Last updated
The Count
The count box art scott adams.jpg
Developer(s) Adventure International
Publisher(s) Adventure International
Designer(s) Scott Adams
Series Adventure
Platform(s) Acorn Electron, Apple II, Atari 8-bit, BBC Micro, Commodore 64, Dragon 32/64, PET, TI-99/4A, TRS-80, VIC-20, ZX Spectrum
Release1979
Genre(s) Interactive fiction
Mode(s) Single-player

The Count is a text adventure written by Scott Adams and published by Adventure International in 1979. The player character has been sent to defeat the vampire Count Dracula by the local Transylvanian villagers, and must obtain and use items from around the vampire's castle in order to defeat him. [1]

Contents

Gameplay

The player moves from location to location, picking up any objects found and using them somewhere else to solve puzzles. The interface is text based; commands took the form of verb and noun, e.g. "Climb Tree". Movement from location to location is limited to North, South, East, West, Up, and Down.

The game differs from earlier Scott Adams adventures due to the use of time. [2] Set over three days, certain problems need to be solved on particular days, and events happen at particular times on certain days. The protagonist also has to avoid being attacked on the first two nights to finish the game.

Development

Prior to developing The Count, it's developer Scott Adams was the first person to sell text adventure games. His first was a version of Adventure released in 1978. [3] The Count was developed in the late 1970s and was the fifth game in Adams' Adventure series of video games which began with Adventureland (1978). Each of these games took about a month to develop. For The Count, Adams wanted to add new features to the game which included a day and night cycle in the game to have it exist over several days. Adams said that "Dracula is a creature of the night, the player is a creature of the day, so I was going to need multiple days to tell the story." [4] As the game was text adventure, he had little memory for the text in the game and counted on players being familiar with imagery from Dracula and Frankenstein stories and could get too in-depth with text for describing scenarios. [5]

To develop the gameplay Adams envisioned the setting in his mind and what items would populate these areas and how they could be used in a puzzle. Testing these puzzles grew out of playtesting them with friends and family. This involved creating a few rooms and selectable items and watching them play, noting any bugs or how players would try to tackle the problems. Adams never storyboarded a game and said that he often had no idea where the narrative would go. [6]

Release

The Count was released in 1979 for the TRS-80. [7] [8] It was re-released with graphics as part of SAGA (Scott Adams Grand Adventures) series in the early 1980s for computers such as the Apple II and Atari 8-bit line. [9]

Reception

Bruce Campbell reviewed The Count in The Space Gamer No. 45. [10] Campbell commented that "Unless you are easily frustrated, I highly recommend this program." [10] A review in the 1984 Software Encyclopedia gave the game a seven out of ten rating, noting it's single-player and gameplay was excellent and that "failure is a fate likely to turn anyone pale." [11]

Related Research Articles

Interactive fiction, often abbreviated IF, is software simulating environments in which players use text commands to control characters and influence the environment. Works in this form can be understood as literary narratives, either in the form of Interactive narratives or Interactive narrations. These works can also be understood as a form of video game, either in the form of an adventure game or role-playing game. In common usage, the term refers to text adventures, a type of adventure game where the entire interface can be "text-only", however, graphical text adventure games, where the text is accompanied by graphics still fall under the text adventure category if the main way to interact with the game is by typing text. Some users of the term distinguish between interactive fiction, known as "Puzzle-free", that focuses on narrative, and "text adventures" that focus on puzzles.

<i>Zork</i> 1977 video game

Zork is a text-based adventure game first released in 1977 by developers Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling for the PDP-10 mainframe computer. The original developers and others, as the company Infocom, expanded and split the game into three titles—Zork I: The Great Underground Empire, Zork II: The Wizard of Frobozz, and Zork III: The Dungeon Master—which were released commercially for a range of personal computers beginning in 1980. In Zork, the player explores the abandoned Great Underground Empire in search of treasure. The player moves between the game's hundreds of locations and interacts with objects by typing commands in natural language that the game interprets. The program acts as a narrator, describing the player's location and the results of the player's commands. It has been described as the most famous piece of interactive fiction.

<i>Kaboom!</i> (video game) 1981 action game

Kaboom! is an action video game published in 1981 by Activision for the Atari 2600. The gameplay was based on the Atari arcade game Avalanche (1978), with the game now involving a Mad Bomber who drops bombs instead of falling rocks. Kaboom! was programmed by Larry Kaplan with David Crane coding the graphics for the buckets and Mad Bomber. It was the last game designed by Kaplan for Activision, who left the company shortly after the release of the game. The game was later ported by Paul Wilson for the Atari 5200 system.

<i>The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy</i> (video game) 1984 video game

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is an interactive fiction video game based on the comedic science fiction series of the same name. It was designed by series creator Douglas Adams and Infocom's Steve Meretzky, and it was first released in 1984 for the Apple II, Macintosh, Commodore 64, CP/M, MS-DOS, Amiga, Atari 8-bit family, and Atari ST. It is Infocom's fourteenth game.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Scott Adams (game designer)</span> American game designer

Scott Adams is an American entrepreneur, computer programmer, and video game designer. He co-founded, with then-wife Alexis, Adventure International in 1979. The company developed and published video games for home computers. The cornerstone products of Adventure International in its early years were the Adventure series of text adventures written by Adams.

<i>Pitfall!</i> 1982 video game

Pitfall! is a video game developed by David Crane for the Atari Video Computer System and released in 1982 by Activision. The player controls Pitfall Harry, who has a time limit of 20 minutes to seek treasure in a jungle. The game world is populated by enemies and hazards that variously cause the player to lose lives or points.

An action-adventure game is a video game hybrid genre that combines core elements from both the action game and adventure game genres.

<i>Castlevania</i> (1999 video game) 1999 video game

Castlevania, also referred to as Castlevania 64, is a 1999 action-adventure video game developed by Konami's Kobe branch for the Nintendo 64. An expanded version of the game, Castlevania: Legacy of Darkness, was released later in the same year.

<i>Haunted House</i> (video game) 1982 video game

Haunted House is a 1982 adventure video game programmed by James Andreasen for the Atari Video Computer System and published by Atari. The player controls an avatar shaped like a pair of eyes who explores a mansion seeking out parts of an urn to return to the entrance. The game world is populated by roaming enemies including vampire bats, tarantulas, and a ghost. Haunted House was among the first games to use player-controlled scrolling between large portions of the visual space.

<i>Voodoo Castle</i> 1979 video game

Voodoo Castle is a text adventure game written by Scott Adams and his wife Alexis. Published by Adventure International in 1979, it is #4 in the Scott Adams Adventure series.

<i>Pirate Adventure</i> 1979 video game

Pirate Adventure is a text adventure program written by Scott Adams.

<i>Mystery Fun House</i> (video game) 1979 video game

Mystery Fun House is a text adventure game written by Scott Adams, "Adventure 7" in the series released by Adventure International. The player explores a fun house explore to locate a set of secret plans, solving puzzles along the way. Mystery Fun House was produced in only one week and was among the most difficult games in the series.

<i>Superman</i> (1979 video game) Action-adventure game for the Atari 2600

Superman is a video game programmed by John Dunn for the Atari Video Computer System and released in 1979 by Atari, Inc. The player controls Superman, whose quest is to explore an open-ended environment to find three pieces of a bridge that was destroyed by Lex Luthor, capture Luthor and his criminal gang, and return to the Daily Planet building. The game world is populated by antagonists such as a helicopter that re-arranges the bridge pieces and roving kryptonite satellites that cause Superman to revert into Clark Kent.

<i>Questprobe featuring The Hulk</i> 1984 video game

Questprobe featuring The Hulk is a 1984 graphic adventure video game developed and published by Adventure International in collaboration with Marvel Comics. It is the first entry in Questprobe, an intended series of graphic adventure games that only released three installments before the developer's bankruptcy. The game's narrative follows the Marvel superhero Hulk and his human alter-ego Bruce Banner, who must explore the mysterious lair of the Chief Examiner. The graphics and story outline were created by Marvel artists and writers. Critical reception was generally positive, with much of the praise going to the visuals. Reactions to the gameplay were mixed, especially upon the game's budget re-release, by which time it was considered dated.

Adventure International was an American video game publishing company that existed from 1979 until 1986. It was started by Scott and Alexis Adams. Their games were notable for being the first implementation of the adventure genre to run on a microcomputer system. The adventure game concept originally came from Colossal Cave Adventure which ran strictly on large mainframe systems at the time.

<i>Dracula 3: The Path of the Dragon</i> 2008 video game

Dracula 3: The Path of the Dragon is a 2008 point-and-click adventure video game developed by Kheops Studio for Microsoft Windows, and published by MC2 France under their Microïds label in Europe and Encore in North America. In 2010, an abridged version of the game developed by Tetraedge Games and published by Chillingo was released in a three-part episodic form for iOS. The full version of the game was ported to OS X in 2010, published by Coladia. Also in 2010, the three-part iOS version was made available for PC as the Dracula Series. In 2014, the abridged iOS version was made available as a single game on Steam.

<i>Dracula 2: The Last Sanctuary</i> 2000 video game

Dracula 2: The Last Sanctuary is a 2000 graphic adventure video game developed by Wanadoo Edition and jointly published by Index+, France Telecom Multimedia, Canal+ Multimedia and Cryo Interactive. Originally released for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS, it was ported to the PlayStation in 2002. In 2012, a slightly modified version developed and published by Microïds was released for iOS and OS X, and, in 2013, for Android. In 2014, the remade iOS/OS X/Android version was made available on Steam. There were dubbing mutations in French, English, Spanish, German, Italian, Hungarian and Czech.

<i>Dracula: Origin</i> 2008 video game

Dracula: Origin is a point-and-click adventure game for the PC based on the novel Dracula by Bram Stoker. Released by Frogwares in 2008, it follows the company's catalogue of adventure games such as the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes series.

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.

<i>Dracula: Crazy Vampire</i> 2001 video game

Dracula: Crazy Vampire is a 2001 action game for the Game Boy Color developed by Planet Interactive Development and published by DreamCatcher Interactive. The game was licensed as part of the Universal Studios Monsters franchise used for Universal Studios books and toys featuring Count Dracula.

References

  1. ↑ Matthews, Ken (December 1984). "Scott Adams' Classic Adventures". Micro Adventurer. Sunshine Books (14): 17, 19.
  2. ↑ "Profiles: Scott Adams".
  3. ↑ Montfort 2005, p. 121.
  4. ↑ Drury, p. 52.
  5. ↑ Drury, pp. 52–53.
  6. ↑ Drury, p. 53.
  7. ↑ Drury, p. 54.
  8. ↑ SoftSide 1979, pp. 66–67.
  9. ↑ Drury, p. 55.
  10. 1 2 Campbell, Bruce (November 1981). "Capsule Reviews". The Space Gamer . Steve Jackson Games (45): 34.
  11. ↑ Kunkel 1984, p. 77.

Sources

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.