![]() ![]() It is sometimes remembered as one of the earliest “full talkie” adventure games but actually the CD version including the “full talkie” version was not released until 1995 (at least not for IBM PC compatibles). ![]() Simon the Sorcerer itself was released either on Januor Septem(sources vary) although the latter date seems more probable. (That said, someone should really play Personal Nightmare for this blog but knowing the game it definitely won’t be me, sorry.) They finally recovered from this by working on Simon the Sorcerer and rebranded themselves yet again as Adventure Soft in order to release their new ‘British LucasArts’ games, releasing Simon the Sorcerer I & II as well as The Feeble Files which is quite dear to my heart – hopefully I will have the opportunity to cover it for this blog as well some day. When they began to set their sights on the new 16-bit platforms the company was reinvented under the more adult moniker of Horror Soft, giving us Personal Nightmare, Elvira I & II as well as Waxworks. Later they began to release their own games as well and when the original Adventure International US went bankrupt in 1986 Woodroffe’s company branched out into new directions, notably some Fighting Fantasy video games. This is actually the same company that was founded by Mike Woodroffe in Sutton Coldfield (very close to Birmingham) in 1983 in order to resell software from US companies – most notably the Scott Adams adventures – to the British market. And Adventure Soft? Well, that’s a hell of a story. Infocom? That’s right, Activision used the brand of the now-defunct company they’d bought and (at least helped to) run into the ground to market this British game in the United States. One of the most interesting tidbits about Simon the Sorcerer – albeit with relatively little effect on the actual gameplay experience, I reckon – is that it unites two of the most important early adventure game brands: Adventure Soft and Infocom. Then the series shared the fate of so many others and got some rather unfortunate late sequels. Some people loved them, some people didn’t quite feel they were the bee’s knees but on the whole they were regarded as quality point & click adventure games. However, in 1993 this was all fair game.Īnother common wisdom that remained true from the mid-1990’s until 2002 was that there were two Simon the Sorcerer games (and two only) and people would tell you “eh.they’re good”. Simon the Sorcerer was one of the many games that copied the LucasArts formula using a very similar verb list but games like this would soon feel like roadblocks on the way to the casual adventure game of the mid-1990’s. Now some games used a simplified interface while others still followed the model that had been established with the SCUMM engine in 1987 – an interface that could be understood as a graphical representation of the parser that had fueled so many text adventures. Granted, FMV games and Myst were slowly chipping away at the genre's reputation but the core of the point & click experience was largely intact. LucasArts was still churning out amazing adventure games and no-one saw the death of the genre coming.
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