Maniac Mansion wasn’t too bad, as long as you weren’t completely messing up (do not give a psychotic man his exploded hamster). The worst offender was probably Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders, which required switching between multiple characters in completely different locations, and a limited supply of money (though you could cheat at the lottery if you planned right). By Loom, deaths were avoidable, and by Monkey Island dead was impossible except for 1 notable exception.
But the Sierra games stayed unforgiving, or even got worse. Leisure Suit Larry 1 and 6+7 were forgiving, IIRC 2 was the worst. Later games like King’s Quest VI was even bad - I forgot to give the ring to someone in the first zone, and after going to multiple islands and even the depths of hell, I couldn’t finish the last part because I didn’t have the item.
Oddly enough, I had an easier time finish Zak than Maniac Mansion. I’m pretty sure I didn’t even finish Maniac Mansion until well after I had Zak (loved that game.) That said, I happened upon the bent butterknife “work of art” trick very early in my play in the game (you get $1500 instead of $100 for selling it at the pawn shop if it’s bent), so money was not really an issue (and then, IIRC, you can win the lottery as much as you want when you get someone on the spaceship.)
I just gave up on Sierra games. I liked them in theory, but, good lord were they infuriating for the reasons you listed. I don’t think I finished a single one.
For me it was SimCity. I had my C-64 but our family PC was just an old green-screen IBM. I visited a friend that I didn’t see very often and watched him play SimCity in incredible EGA graphics. The game looked amazing and indeed became one of my favorite series until EA got their hands on Maxis.
Not long after I saw SimCity for the first time, I found a C-64 version in some pulpy game catalog. I asked my parents if I could order it (I could afford it on my allowance) but they seemed weirdly against it–I was disappointed and couldn’t figure it out because they weren’t against games or me ordering stuff in general. Today, my only explanation is that they thought the game was called Sin City, which indeed is unlikely to be appropriate for a kid and cause them to give me a flat no.
Holy cow. I didn’t even realize there was a SimCity available for the C64. Reading the Wikipedia article on it, apparently SimCity was first developed for the C64 in 1985, but wouldn’t be released until 1989.
I loved those text based adventure games. Our school used to let us use the computers in our lunch break (which was great on cold rainy winter days) and me and some friends would play against each other and other kids in the class. Kind of like an early MMO. I wish I could remember what it was called. I used to call my myself “bag of gold”. So other kids would be busy trying to pick me up and then BAM I’d stab them with my dagger!
Yep. I’ve no idea how good it is. I’m feeling motivated to dig up an emulator to see how it plays. Screenshots look pretty crude compared to the PC version, though.
There’s a few gameplay videos of it on Youtube. Here’s the one I watched. Looks reasonable and playable, though if you were exposed to the PC versions of SimCity first, you might think it’s terrible.
Now, now. The C64 could do some amazing stuff graphically for what it was. Now, this one was at the very end of the C64’s life when most of its tricks had been figured out, but have you seen Mayhem in Monsterland? (The scrolling in that game is incredible for a C64. Look at 10:58 onward. I had no idea that computer was capable of such fast and smooth scrolling.)
I’m actually surprised it was the only one. I was going to mention Utopia as at least being a proto-city building type game, but then I realized I had that on my Sears version of Intellivision, not the C64. And it really doesn’t look like there were any others. Huh.
BTW: SimCity was one of the last titles that I bought for my 64. I didn’t get into MS-DOS until a couple years later, when I bought the last Tandy 1000 that the local Radio Shack ever had in stock.
my dad gifted me the ti/4a ….and when I asked someone the toy store about games they sent me to a book rack with booklets that looked like Atari instructions …… and you bought one for 4 or 5 bucks…and typed the game in your self ……………
same thing for the vic 20 and c 64 …… I learned coding sucked and if I ever made games id draw the pretty pics and write the cool story and let the code monkeys figure the rest out………
Text Adventures are still going strong…just not commercially. A group of enthusiasts in the usenet alt.fiction.interactive group started a competition back in the day. One of the most noteworthy is Andrew Plotkin (AKA Zarf), who I first learned about my freshman year of college in 1994 when I came across his collection of interactive games on the web. It was noteworthy because these were the days before javascript or shockwave or flash or java any of the software that was designed for ease of web application programming. He closed down his list once those aforementioned development kits were released.
at the windows store look for retro city ……its the open source sim city classic ….wright just gave it away ……
anyone remeber the text games with pictures ? my friend had police quest one ……then they remastered all the text parser games into point and click and he beat pq1 in an hour 30 ……the original took forever because of the typing ………
Mattel Football (1977) was amazingly playable considering the graphics were something like 27 LEDs. (Mattel Football I)
Omega Race on the Vic 20 was great. Do you remember the opening titles? It took place in the distant future – the year 2003.
I also have fond memories of loading Snakman (a low budget Pac Man clone for the Vic 20) from cassette. It had a cool feature where you could break into the ghost’s cell and get high scores.
I actually don’t remember it at all, but I did finally find a video that included the intro.
“In the year 2003, the Omegan system developed a method of training its warriors to protect their star colonies. Over the city of Komar, android controlled fighters raced to engage and destroy these Omegan warriors.”
It seems like Dungeons and Dragons went through a similar thing. Take 30 minutes to roll up a character, 50% chance of dying in the following 10 minutes. At some point either the publishers, or more likely the growing body (pun intended) of experienced DMs, caught on and injected a bit of mercy into the game.