The Beast of Torrack Moor

chris00, March 20, 2015 - Reply
I think perhaps you are being harsh here. Perhaps you are approaching the game from the wrong perspective.

It is inaccurate to assume that everyone must have been exposed to Infocom games in the 1980s. I didn't play my first Infocom game until 1992. Many authors of that time were adults from depressed areas or children or people with very little money.

A good portion of UK adventure lovers did not have access to a computer that could even play the Infocom titles. The ZX Spectrum retailed for 140 GBP, and could be had for half of that later in its life (on the used market). The Commodore 64, which was the cheapest popular machine that could run Infocom titles retailed for £399 pounds. The Spectrum was a roaring success compared to the Commodore 64. And most of the adventures released on the Spectrum - were written with a Spectrum. There is a Galapagos situation that went on with the Spectrum adventure scene for that very reason.

Infocom adventures generally required either lots of memory, or a disk drive. The ZX Spectrum had neither. You can now play a subset of infocom titles on the spectrum via rom hacks and disk images for later model spectrums, but at the time, there were zero options for Spectrum gamers to play Infocom titles. We simply didn't know what we were missing.

You had a lot of amateur authors of Spectrum adventures that had never sampled even the worst of Infocom. Men and women, boys and girls alike that leveraged the primitive tools on the market to make simple adventure games, self publishing using tape to tape recorders and photocopied/xeroxed inlays, selling for tiny sums of money. The market was largely tiny and amateurish. It was also charming.

The market for adventure games was small, and became smaller over the lifespan of the machines. I did not even hear the terminology IF until just a few years ago - we called them 'adventures'.

My point is that for most of the 80s, with some exceptions (Level 9 games come to mind) ZX Spectrum adventures were following the 2 word parser model via tools like "The Quill". "PAW" made it easier for amateur authors to have a quality parser without being an assembly code programmer. It introduced a lot more gameplay possibilities with support for 128K. Many commercial adventures also used Quill as their game engine of choice so two word parsers were what you mostly expected from adventures.

I think Linda Wright (who wrote "The Beast") did an excellent job in presenting a non-trivial story with interesting descriptions and characters.

Was it perfect? Of course not. Was it up to Infocom levels of writing? No. But for someone to create this by themselves, and to create a good sense of atmosphere by themselves. To find a publisher and get it published by themselves. I think it is an outstanding achievement. The Beast is a fine little story.

Myself, I bought this game back in 1988 after reading a review in Your Sinclair. I was looking for a story driven adventure with a decent parser, and this seemed to match my requirements. I enjoyed the text, the graphics, and the sense of Englishness about the whole thing. So many games were set in exotic landscapes, but there are few places more welcoming than a stereotypical English village. I enjoyed experiencing the story in this setting. Being able to explore a place familiar to me, with complete freedom, role playing as an adult was such a pleasant experience. I wasn't playing something fantastical, this was what it was like to be an adult and to have agency.

Implementation issues, well, I don't know. I think it is certainly possible with all the time-based events to get the game in an unwinnable state ... but so many older adventures have the same problem. And Infocom games are not short of implementation flaws either. There is a website dedicated to them. Also, it's not like Linda Wright had a testing department to test all paths through the game, and some games are designed so that the player must learn the path through the game. She was a sole developer, and I think she did an outstanding job with the game.