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Mystery house game publisher4/15/2023 ![]() It's a masterful little hack, one that shows how far Ken had come as a programmer from his days as a drone-in-training at Control Data Institute.Ĭombined with a simple parser and world model about on the level of the Scott Adams games, the final product looked like this. Thus to store his graphics Ken needed only "record" the motions of the stylus as it traced Roberta's simple drawings, then "play back" those motions on the screen when called for in the game. (Or, for the more technically inclined: they are stored as vector graphics, not raster graphics.) The really elegant bit is that the drawing statements used to create them correspond with the motions of the stylus that traced them on the VersaWriter. In other words, instead of being fetched from disk, the pictures in Mystery House are "drawn" anew by the computer each time they appear. With compressed graphics standards still unheard of (and likely too taxing on the little Apple's 6502 if they had been), Ken hit upon the idea of storing each picture not as the data that made up the final product, but rather as a series of drawing commands that could be used to create it afresh. If he wished to avoid the hassle of shipping the game on many disks and asking the user to swap among them, he needed to find a better way. Storing 30 or more images on disk as simple grids of pixels would consume far more space than Ken had available on a single disk. In doing so, he actually solved his second challenge almost accidentally. Like a good hacker, he promptly set to work writing his own software to operate it. Now he needed to find a way to make it work. Still uncertain about this whole enterprise and desiring to do it on the cheap, Ken went with the VersaWriter. Apple's tablet, however, cost $650, while the VersaWriter could be had for less than $200. Apple itself had actually released a drawing tablet much more suitable for illustrations the previous year. into the Apple II its packaged software did not deal very well with the irregular lines and patterns typical of full-blown pictures. The device was marketed as a tool for getting diagrams - flowcharts, circuit diagrams, floor plans, etc. The user was rather expected to insert a sketch under the transparent surface of the drawing area, and then to trace it using the stylus. The VersaWriter was far too persnickety to allow for free-hand drawing. Ken and Roberta therefore ended up purchasing an ungainly contraption called a VersaWriter. This latter problem arose because Ken and Roberta were determined to provide pictures for every single location in the game, amounting to some 30 illustrations in all.Ĭreating pictures on the Apple II was a dicey proposition in early 1980, due not only to a dearth of usable paint programs but also to the lack of a suitable input device to use with them mice were still years away, while drawing with a joystick, trackball, or keyboard was an inevitably sloppy, frustrating process. ![]() Still, pulling it off would require them to overcome two other challenges: how to get the pictures into the Apple II in the first place, and how to store them in such a way that they didn't consume too much space on disk. ![]() Roberta would be the first to admit that she was no artist, but she was up to creating some sketches that would suit the purpose in a world with no graphic adventures at all, people after all wouldn't be too inclined to criticize the aesthetics of the first one to appear. When we left Ken and Roberta, they had just made the momentous decision to use the Apple II's bitmap graphics capabilities to create an adventure game that featured pictures in addition to text. The making of Mystery House, written by Jimmie Maher at The Digital Antiquarian)
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