Curses (video game)

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For the 1925 film directed by Fatty Arbuckle, see Curses!
Curses
Curses game screenshot.png
Curses being played in a modern interpreter.
Developer(s)Graham Nelson
Publisher(s)Self published
Designer(s)Graham Nelson
EngineZ-machine
Platform(s)Z-machine
Release1993
Genre(s)Interactive Fiction, Adventure
Mode(s)Single player

Curses is an interactive fiction computer game created by Graham Nelson in 1993. Appearing in the beginning of the non-commercial era of interactive fiction, it is considered one of the milestones of the genre.

Writing for The New York Times, Edward Rothstein described the game as "acclaimed."[1]

Plot[]

The player plays the part of an English aristocrat called Victor Meldrew. In the course of searching the attic for an old tourist map of Paris, Meldrew steps into a surreal adventure to uncover a centuries-old curse that has been placed on the family. The goal of the game is to find the missing map, and thus annul the curse.

Development[]

Curses was originally developed on an Acorn Archimedes using Acorn C/C++, before Nelson moved to his Inform programming language, which was simultaneously released.[2][3] It was the first non-test game developed in the language.[3] It is distributed without charge as a Z-Code executable. The Inform source code is not publicly available.

Innovations[]

Curses contains some innovations that contribute to its appeal.

  • Managing the player's inventory by automatically placing items in a container to make room for an object needed in hand (such as placing an item in the rucksack when reading an entry in a book), eliminating the tedium of having to manually drop one item before picking up another.
  • Commands places and objects, displaying all the locations visited and all the objects seen during the game.

See also[]

  • Jigsaw (video game), another Graham Nelson game that serves as a loose sequel to Curses
  • Turtle (robot) (a voice-operated form of the robot appears in one of the game's more difficult puzzles)

References[]

  1. ^ Rothstein, Edward (1998-04-06). "TECHNOLOGY: CONNECTIONS; In the intricacy of a text game, no object is superfluous, no formulation too strange". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 2008-11-13. Retrieved 2008-11-13.
  2. ^ Montfort, Nick (2005). "7 The Independents". Twisty little passages : an approach to interactive fiction. Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States: MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-63318-3. Before Nelson began work on Inform [...] Using an Acorn Archimedes and programming in ANSI C, he quickly abandoned his small game to begin developing Curses, using that to put the in-progress compiler through its paces.
  3. ^ a b "Interview: Graham Nelson". XYZZY News. Eileen Mullin. Archived from the original on 2008-10-30. Retrieved 2008-10-30. I use two languages, the excellent Norcroft ANSI C compiler and Inform.

External links[]

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