Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

One thing to always keep in mind about very old games is technical restraints in not just what the physical hardware can do, but what tools are available that makes creation easier. A great many of these games have spawned from the fact source code was printed in multiple sources, and the times an author has had to “work from scratch” has had mixed results.

The same is true for graphics, which with the exception of some works that were illustrated after 1982, they’ve nearly all had a general sense of jank; the closest I think we’ve had to “good” game illustrated in 1982 (not a 1982 game illustrated later!) is The Queen of Phobos. The extra hurdle of essentially needing to write one’s own graphics editor was one step too far for many authors.

Mind you, early graphics software did exist; Sierra On-line started advertising their own graphics system in their second print ad. However, it wasn’t until 1982 there was a system advanced enough to be a bona fide hit and work with adventure games: Mark Pelczarski with The Graphics Magician.

Via eBay.

The story of Pelczarski has been told well elsewhere (try here first) so I’m not going to do a re-telling, nor will I go into the prior versions which weren’t as famous (he sold Magic Paintbrush in 1979 in a Ziploc); I will say one of the major selling points was that it was fine to use with commercial work as long as The Graphics Magician was credited. (This is similar to Unity’s splash screen requirement.) It ended up being dominant in early 80s graphics.

I’ve seen credited elsewhere that Incrocci used Graphics Magician (with his art like Masquerade, which we recently played) but his games do not credit the program (as is supposed to be required) so I am unclear if that’s what he really used. Other than possibility that we haven’t seen anything of the program (although the graphical version of Oo-topos used it as well as some of the graphical versions of the Scott Adams games — just we didn’t play those versions).

So with those caveats, The Incredible Shrinking Man Adventure is our first game with credit to The Graphics Magician.

It was published in Softdisk in January 1983, but everyone lists it as 1982 because that’s what the copyright notice says.

The diskmags did not have the same rules as printmags in terms of publication delay so it really probably wasn’t publicly available until January, but eh, close enough. (It is faintly possible the game had some circulation beforehand, anyway.)

Softdisk we’ve encountered before (see Planet of the Robots, Space Gorn) and Space Gorn in particular was by Anthony Chiang, who returns in this game as a co-author with Kenneth.

The setup is simply that you have had a science experiment gone wrong and are now very small.

The game at first appears to be simply the On-Line Systems etc. classic view, where you start shrunk under a table…

…but what’s interesting is that the game is trying to render the room you are in as simply multiple perspectives of a real 3D view, and you can view the same thing closer or farther depending on where you are standing. We saw this a little bit in the “dungeon crawler” style games like Asylum and Haunted Palace, but here it still falls within the Sierra style, including only sometimes describing the items that are in view.

You can go in the tackle box and find a hook.

The game is fairly short although not quite as simple as Space Gorn. It is certainly possible to get stuck, although step 1 is fairly clear: take some cheese and give it to a mouse.

On the north side of the big room there’s a door you can squeeze under to find a cat. The cat of course wants the mouse, and you get the string that We Have Garfield at Home the orange cat was playing with.

With the string in hand you can TIE STRING TO HOOK which turns it into a GRAPPLE. The grapple then works on the right spot in the room to be able to hook onto the table and climb to the top.

Having climbed to the top, you can find an antidote for the shrinking, although to get into the vial you need to take a comb from the floor and set it down like a ladder.

the cut text is “THERMAL NUCLEAR WARHEAD. World’s safest science fair!”

Given the context — what is assumingly a fan duo rather than a professional company — the graphics were clear and well-designed, so I appreciate this (if nothing else) for an early example of The Graphics Magician being used by the public. This will also not be the last appearance from the Chiangs (they have two more games on Softdisk, and one in a different publication) but they’ll have to wait until 1983.