| Acheton | Jon Thackray, David Seal and Jonathan Partington / Topologika | 1987 | |
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This is a large adventure in the Colossal Cave style.
Acheton predates most published adventures barring Colossal Cave (by
which its authors were inspired) and Zork (the original Vax version).
Trek through a giant dungeon in this early, influential classic. There's
a huge mystery at your fingertips, and you'll unravel using an amazing
200 unique objects. Groundbreaking graphics and addicting gameplay abound
through the game's 400 levels, each of which is packed with gruesome
enemies and hidden secrets. Perhaps the first adventure game written outside the U.S. (c. 1979), by several guys working in the mathematics department of Cambridge University, England. "Acheton" is an enormous cave game, whose name is a confection of "Acheron" (the river that dead used to cross in order to get to Hades) and "Achates" (minor character in Virgil's "Aeneid"), based around exploration and collecting treasures. Thackray and Seal devised one of the earliest adventure-design systems (which although basically an assembler was influential on for instance the modern design system "Inform") and it was publically used on the Cambridge IBM mainframe ("Phoenix") until the mid-1990s. Acornsoft, then the software arm of Acorn Computers Ltd., also based in Cambridge and with strong links to the university, published a conversion of "Acheton" to the BBC Micro, on two 100K floppy discs (one containing the game, one containing hints) and was later ported to the PC. In 1999, it was made freeware. |
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