The "first graphic adventure" (according to itself), and the title that launched the game development careers of Roberta and Ken Williams (and launched Sierra On-Line), is now available on the Pico-8. Do YOU have what it takes to become "a guru wizard?"
All text, graphics, and bugs of the game that launched the game development careers of Ken and Roberta Williams have been lovingly ported to your favorite virtual console. Yes, the entire 140K original has been crunched down to a single 60K cart, including save state, with all new hand-drawn images (see "Tools Used" below). The construction of the game is essentially broken down into engine and data, meaning it could be modified or remixed or rebuilt into a new game (detailed blog posts are in the works).
**NOTE: this is a text adventure, and so it requires a keyboard. Not a mobile-friendly game, I'm sorry to say.
**UPDATE: added a link to an in-depth analysis of the mechanisms that drove the original game
Screenshots
Tools Used
This conversion of the public domain classic was made possible by three factors:
- The analysis and data dump provided by Inspecting the Foundation of Mystery House by J. Aycock and K. Biittner for the Journal of Contemporary Archaeology, 2019
- The creation of a companion art program built just to make this game, Versawriter-8. This allows the game to hold graphics data in a "vector" format similar to the original, and provides tracing tools which mimic the workflow of the original creators with a Versawriter on the Apple 2.
- The creation of another companion program, 1 Bit Wonder, which leverages a simple approach to image compression with 0-token (?) decompression.*
Further details on Versawriter-8 and 1 Bit Wonder will be posted in the coming days.
For now, here's a screenshot of each in action.
Want to Know More?
Uncompressed data, un-minified source code, notes, and more are at
https://github.com/ChristopherDrum/mystery_house_remodeled/
The custom drawing program, Versawriter-8, used to do the graphics is available now
https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=53461
The custom sprite compressor, One Bit Wonder, is available now
https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=53207
An itch.io page is also available at
https://christopherdrum.itch.io/mystery-house
Want to Know WAY TOO MUCH More?
Here's a very lengthy blog post about how the original game worked, as discovered while porting the game. This presents a kind of "software archaeology" analysis of the game. There's not too much specific to the Pico-8 except to discuss some of the ways that "classic bugs" were translated to the Pico-8 environment.
https://christopherdrum.itch.io/mystery-house/devlog/545148/mystery-house-excavated
*if PAL and SSPR draw calls are already part of your graphics routine, it may actually be zero additional tokens.
Christopher, I always appreciate your love of the classics and the effort you put in to bringing them to PICO-8! Ken & Roberta are responsible for many of my earliest non-console gaming memories playing King's Quest I, II & III, but my school computer lab had an Apple II and a copy of this game and I was hooked immediately. It's such a treat to be able to play this again on PICO-8!
Holy heck, this is a really impressive feat. 👏🤓
Congrats on crunching this classic down so authentically.
Amazing work. Really enjoying going through it. Very impressed by however you got all those graphics in it.
@Godmil It may surprise you to learn that the original had completely separate full-screen images for rooms with the door open vs. the door closed. I duplicated that as well, so many rooms have two completely different drawings. In other words, there are probably 40% more graphics in it than you may at first think. Watch for differences when opening doors!
@2bitchuck I had a strong feeling you'd be one of the first to enjoy this, and I'm glad to give this to you.
@Liquidream Well, it's no SCUMM-8, but it's not too bad. Honestly, it could have been crunched down WAY more if I'd taken the coward's path and reused room graphics more. But the original didn't do that, so I didn't either. I think there's enough space to make a game that is at least 50% larger, with smarter reuse of assets. (something that is trivial to do now, and was perhaps difficult for the original implementation)
What a cool project! The game itself, by modern standards, it's quite unplayable :-) But I love how you went all the way and reinvented the past.
Update: Added link to the post for Versawriter-8, the custom vector drawing program used to do the compressed graphics for the game.
Update: Added link to the post for One Bit Wonder, the custom bit-plane image compression I used for the game. Just call pal() before spr() to "decompress" a sprite from a given bit-plane; almost token-free decompression.
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