The 90s sucked. I see no use in denying it. However, the Amiga was cool. I was just looking for some info on the system, when I found that this title was made by Ocean.
P.S. The hero “Ivanhoe” is a short, long-haired blonde guy wearing armor, and he looks kinda European-style cartoonish. Interesting interpretation of a classic piece of literature. So, anyone else know of games based on novels?
Douglas Adams created a text-adventure based on Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but I think it was just for the Mac. This was in the 80’s sometime.
I played that one on an Apple IIc. I’m pretty sure Infocom did their stuff on multiple platforms, so there would have been a DOS version.
Philip K Dick’s work has popped up here and there.
Blade Runner and UBIK were both released on PC. Although Bladerunner was accurate to the movie and not the book “Do Androids Dream” and I’ve not played UBIK, but it seems to include elements of Dick’s work such as telepaths IIRC.
Tom Clancy’s Hunt for Red October
Stephen Coonts’ Flight of the Intruder
Dale Brown’s *Flight of the Old Dog * as the game Megafortress
Rainbow Six, and all the team-based tactical shooters that came out thereafter - I guess this would include even the Splinter Cell series.
There were two games made based on Feist’s Midkemia universe, Betrayal at Krondor and Return to Krondor . The first one in particular was quite a good game for the time it was released. Feist later wrote the events of the two games into (lackluster, by his standards) novels.
Wasn’t DeathTrap Dungeon a Choose-your-own-adventure type book?
Lord of the Rings.
Dune.
Neuromancer, by William Gibson, was made into a game for DOS, Apple IIe and C64.
I think it would be more accurate to say that these, along with the Harry Potter games, are adaptations of the movies that are adaptations of the books.
Hey, if somebody can say Blade Runner, I can certainly say Dune and LOTR.
They made a Wheel of Time first person shooter game.
If we’re going to include comic books we’ve got Spider-Man, Superman, X-Men, and a bunch of others that came out way before their movie counterparts. Eg. Spider-Man appeared on the Atari 2600 and the X-Men appeared on the NES, Game Gear, and the arcades.
Marc
There was a Xanth PC game based on the Piers Anthony novels (and tied in with one of the books). It was fairly amusing.
Now wait just a nit-pickin’ minute! If you are referring to current games, yes. But there have been quite a lot of games (over a hundred?), made before the movie that take place in middle earth. http://www.lysator.liu.se/tolkien-games/chronology.html
Infocom games used an interpreter that read game files to make games more easily ported from system to system. All you had to do was program a system-specific version of the z-file interpreter and you could run pretty much any Infocom game on that system. I can’t recall any system or OS off-hand (within limits–you can’t really squeeze Planetfall on a vic-20) that doesn’t have some form of the z-interpreter ported to it.
Anyway. I’ve used a disk image utility to extract the Hitch-hiker’s game from an Apple II disk image (I actually own that version, so it’s perfectly legal for me) and run that game on my PC (using WinFrotz).
Hm. Back to topic.
Fred Pohl’s Gateway novels were made into a couple of reasonable neat text adventures (with graphics).
I once had an Infocom graphic adventure (still pictures with text, not animation) based on James Clavell’s Shogun. It was pretty cool, if really hard. Especially when you have to navigate through the storm to reach the shore of Japan. That part was tough. Probably if I’d read the book beforehand, or even seen all of the mini-series, it would have been easier. But it was a pretty cool game.
There are some books called “Death Gate” which was made into a rather cool adventure game.
Probably a strench but there were a couple games based off Wagner’s Ring Cycle, which in Turn were based off various ancient Germaniac works.
There are a number of games based off the works of HP Lovecraft.
“Alone in the Dark” and “Shadow of the Comet” are perhaps the best of the commerically released ones. “Anchorhead” was a great fan text-game. “Prisoner of Ice” was inspired by “At the Mountains of Madness”.
But not before the animated movies.
I must admit I missed that but scrolling up I see Pushkin acknolwedged that the game owed more to the movie than the book.