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The Best Apple II Graphical Adventure Games

Submitted by mattbarton.exe on November 8, 2005 - 12:56am. Apple II

Greetings, everyone. A friend and I are writing a book on the history of the Graphical Adventure Game (e.g., King's Quest), but neither of us had Apple IIs back in the day, yet we are aware of the tremendous importance the platform had for early GAGs. We've been playing through games like Mystery House and Time Zone, but I was wondering if anyone here would like to point out which GAGs were really innovative and popular back during the Apple II's heyday. In other words, what Apple II gags would you guys really want to see mentioned and discussed in a book like ours?

I'd really appreciate your responses. I'll be checking this forum here, but you can also reach me at mattbarton.exe AT gmail DOT com.

Thanks!

Matt

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The Quest

Submitted by mutant_pie on November 10, 2005 - 5:06am.

The Quest, by Penguin Software was very decent.

Mark Pelzarski was the president of the company and author of several of the graphics software routines developed by Penguin. As memory was small, and every kilobyte of RAM was at a premium, on those old eight bit machines, he developed a drawing program that saved each step of the drawing, not the bit map of the final picture. This method meant that if, for example you wanted a picture of a circle on the screen, that the picture generating routines would draw a circle, of a given size and color, starting at a certain screen coordinate, and either outlined or solid. A Hi-Res screen (the standard graphic format on an Apple II, II+, IIe, etc. . .) would have normally required 8k of memory, slightly more when stored on the floppy disk. The instructions to draw the circle would require maybe one-hundreth of that. So instead of being limited to maybe 10 screens for a game on a disk, you could have maybe 25-50, depending on the complexity of the drawing.

Most of the graphic adventure games on the Apple II, that used full screen graphics, depended on this method.

By the way, this method is very similar to what Adobe "developed" for their "Illustrator" program, about three years later (I think).

Mutant_Pie

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my fav

Submitted by AlbertaGamer on November 11, 2005 - 11:53pm.

my favourite one was Secret Agent. That was weeks and weeks of pure fun. I still remember my brother working out the maze on a big sheet of paper.

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2Eor2C's picture

Keep On Adventurin'

Submitted by 2Eor2C on January 3, 2006 - 9:23pm.

The very first Hi-Res graphic adventure games were very popular on the Apple IIs back in the 1980s. The interface didn't make use the mouse yet and commands had to be entered through the keyboard by typing in "N","S","W" or "E" to move, or "GET", "LOOK", "SEARCH" etc... Some of these games were exclusively released on the Apple II and never made on other platforms. Furthermore, when they were available on C64 or Atari-8bit for example, the Apple II version often offered the better version with superior bitmap graphics. Gameplay consists of "solving" the game by completing intuitive tasks or answering riddles, which could be particularly difficult at times. Therein lies the fun :-). So my favorite game list would include the following from top to bottom :

- Sherwood Forest
- Masquerade
- The Institute
- Lucifer's Realm
- Spider-man
- Secret Agent
- The Coveted Mirror
- Transylvania
- Mask of the Sun

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