IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORD
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
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
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
