Paranoia

by Sam Shirley

Game, Science Fiction
1987

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CYOA - short and interesting - from 1987, March 20, 2015
by GameStomper (Vancouver, WA)
Related reviews: 1987, CYOA, short, dystopian, christmas, paranoia,

Paranoia is a game converted from a short CYOA magazine article in "Space/Fantasy Gamer - Jan/Feb 1987". As such, there isn't much depth... and you can play through the game easily within 20-30min. But sometimes that's all you really want. This is based on the PARANOIA role-playing game, and as such it thrusts you right into this world with little explanation. If you're not familiar with PARANOIA, it's a little confusing - although the game still has some decent sci-fi writing and atmosphere. Obviously its intended audience is fans of the game. I did enjoy how the Inform port does the dice-rolling, and clone-tracking for you. It's really better experiencing it in this format than jumping around in the article itself.

I initially played this game because it looked like it came from 1977, along with Dungeon (ie. Zork Mainframe). But really it's from an article in the mentioned magazine from 1987 - which happens to be ISSUE 77, so that's why the confusion.

Here's the link if you're interested:
https://archive.org/stream/space-gamer-77/Space_Gamer_77#page/n15/mode/2up

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mherdeg, December 12, 2015 - Reply
Hey, thanks for the archive.org link to the original. I just read through the original C source of the BSD game for fun ( https://stuff.mit.edu/afs/athena/contrib/games/src/bsd-games/paranoia/paranoia.c ) and was wondering where the original was.

Yeah, it would be strange for the source material to have come from 1977 given that the game system dates to 1984.
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