Articles
AFTER THE FLOOD: ATLANTIS IN ADVENTURE GAMES
Edited
by Randy Sluganski
Ah,
Atlantis. We adventure gamers
have dealt with it so often that it has become (along with
the Kings and
bar. While hundreds of historians, geographers and occultists
have published thousands of pages of theory and research on Atlantis,
only we would actually be qualified to lead a tour group
there. (On your left, youll see the famous Pillars of Heracles,
while on your right is the mammoth Crystal Pyramid, the citys
focal point.) How is it that Atlantis has come to figure so
prominently in our beloved adventure game genre?
For
starters, one has to look at the literary roots of the Atlantis
myth. The mysterious Lost Island
of Atlantis was first mentioned in a series of letters by Plato
around 360 B.C. Although fictional, Plato presented Atlantis as
if it were an actual place, giving detailed descriptions of the
main city. By the Middle Ages, most Europeans had come to think
of Atlantis as real, though the theocratic nature of the times
prevented any real scientific inquiry into the subject. By the
1700s, Atlantis had been largely forgotten. Then came the Age
of Enlightenment, and a renewed interest in the subject. Modern
interest in Atlantis really began in 1882 with the publishing of Atlantis:
The Antediluvian World by former U.S. congressman Ignatius
Donnelly. This sparked a renewed and cyclic public fascination
with the Atlantis myth. For a few years it seemed that every geographer
and historian would publish this or that theory about the Lost
Continent, then interest would die down, only to pop back up again
twenty or thirty years later.
The
1970s saw a new resurgence
in popularity of the Atlantis myth and all things related. Several
factors contributed. Perhaps most influential were the series
of books by Erich
von Däniken (Chariots of the Gods, In Search of Ancient
Astronauts, etc) which detailed his theories that the mysterious
artifacts of ancient civilizations were actually constructed by
extraterrestrial visitors. This time period also saw the birth
of the ‘New Age philosophy and practice, from Pyramid Power to
aromatherapy to crystal waving. The Atlantis myth had never
been more popular in the
books on the Atlantis theme appearing.
Coincidentally,
the 1970s also
saw the birth of the PC and the adventure game. It was a match
made in heaven.
IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORD
The first fumbling attempts at text
adventures (Colossal
Cave,
Zork) were centered on exploration of a fantastic and mysterious
setting. It was only natural that with the avid interest in Atlantis
during the same time period that the Lost Continent would soon
become the setting for adventure games. The first commercially
released adventure title to feature Atlantis was Mad Hatter Softwares Voyage
to Atlantis, released in 1982 for the Commodore 64 (and later
for the TRS-80 CoCo). Although graphic adventure games were already
in existence by then, the Atlantis theme was particularly well
suited to the text adventure. The archaic 8-color graphics of
the time simply couldnt do justice to the supposed beauty of Atlantis. Thus
the developers wisely chose to eschew any graphics and let
their descriptions and the players imagination provide the visuals.
This
trend continued throughout the 1980s. While Sierra and LucasArts pioneered advances in graphic adventure gaming,
the Atlantis theme remained the bailiwick of text adventures. A
wealth of Atlantis-based text games appeared over the next 10 years,
geared for every possible platform. The French Amstrad CPC (as
dominant for a time in France as the similar Commodore 64 was here
in the U.S.) got its own Atlantis game in 1985 with Atlantis
Adventure (AKA simply Atlantis). Perhaps the most erudite
and literary of the Atlantis-based text adventures came late to
the party. In 1991, Zenobi Software released Laurence Creightons
wonderful Behold Atlantis for the Spectrum PC. Though the death of
both the Spectrum and text adventuring was already written on the
wall, Behold Atlantis turned out to be a sparkling example
of the genre, reading like a science fiction novel.
However,
the following year, graphic adventure gaming seized the Atlantis
myth by the throat and made
it indelibly its own
