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A look at horror retro text adventures

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Hello everyone! Hope you are all doing well, and hopefully enjoying a drop in case numbers in your country 😉 It's been a very busy month for retro text adventures! But before I start, I wanted to dedicate this month's newsletter to John Wilson, the Rochdale Balrog himself, who sadly passed away on May 31st. John was immensely influential in the British text adventure scene, publishing hundreds of games, mostly on Spectrum, by dozens of authors through his imprint Zenobi Software until well into the 1990s. He was a beloved figure, noted for his kindness and sense of humor; I only met him last year, but he was warm and supportive, and still working on text adventures (he was remaking some of his games in PunyInform and porting them to a lot of platforms, which was super cool to see!). I am glad to see that major gaming outlets have talked about his career and his achievements. RIP John, you will be missed.
Community news The retro text adventure scene keeps having a very high level of activity, which is just great to see! Highlights of this month were: The PunyJam #1 ended, and congratulations to Garry Francis for nabbing the top spot with Captain Cutter's Treasure! A very close second was Djinn on the Rocks, by Joshua Wilson. Congratulations to all the entrants! Davide Bucci has just released Silk Dust, the third chapter of his Emilia Vittorini series, available for 18 platforms for free on his webpage or his itch.io page. I procrastinated a bit too much to test it fully (sorry Davide) but I did some editing to the game text, and from what I saw, it's a pretty neat story with lots of adventures 😊 I really love the atmosphere of his games, as they are both realistic and so refreshing in the global landscape. Give the game a try! 🙂 Stefan Vogt has also released something this month, and nothing less than his Hibernated 1: Director's Cut! This is a remaster of the original game, ported to Z-Machine format, which meant extra memory to add content and puzzles to the game! The game is pretty large, and I think during beta-testing I got 1/3rd of the points in 3-4 hours; and it's got that good pulpy sci-fi flavor with emphatic prose that makes you have a really good time! The game is available for free on his itch.io page and as a physical edition (preorder for now) on PolyPlay's website, for 25 platforms, including the Sam Coupé and the Dragon 64 - astute readers will notice that issue #5 of this newsletter mentioned these platforms didn't have a Z-Machine interpreter... well, Stefan did it! 😄 Aaron A. Reed is continuing his great "50 years of text games" newsletter, and one article this month made heads turn: the one on Silverwolf and, indirectly, on St Bride's. (I talked briefly about them in Issue #3 of this newsletter!) There was some great digging, as usual, and information that didn't seem to be published anywhere else! A great read! Lastly for this month, Strand Games has released their port of Wonderland, the 1990 Lewis Carroll-inspired Magnetic Scrolls game, for the Spectrum Next, including an updated interface and gorgeous-looking graphics. Congratulations to them and to Spectrum Next owners!!
My news Exciting news on my end this month: I am happy to announce that I am now sitting on the Board of Directors of the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation! The Foundation has a few programs to support the IF community at large, including stewardship of IFDB, the IFArchive, and Intfiction.org, and has a history of supporting game creation tools when needed. I have a few ideas of what I could contribute to it, including things related to retro text adventures, but we'll see - for now, I'm still discovering how it all works, and giving input on the Foundation's orientation for the years to come! I'm excited! 😀 Oh and I think I found the pitch for my next retro text adventure... It just struck me, and I knew it was the one, so it is a good one 🙂 It will definitely not come out this year (maybe the physical version of Tristam Island will, though? 😉), but I'm aiming for 2022 !
Article of the month This month's article is on a topic that was suggested to me by Alexander Had, a horror video game connoisseur, who was wondering: why aren't there more horror text adventures, in particular in the 1980s? This is my take on it, and I had a blast writing the article! A special thank you to Wade Clarke, himself a fan of horror, who contributed some great thoughts and arguments to help me cover all aspects of the topic!
Read the article
See you next month! Thanks for reading this issue! Don't hesitate to reach out if you have any comments, or theories about this month's topic - or if you know of community news that I should cover! Thanks again for your support, I'm happy so many people actually read this newsletter and keep retro text adventures alive! 😀
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