Silicon Dreams trilogy
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| Silicon Dreams | |
|---|---|
| Developer(s) | Level 9 Computing |
| Publisher(s) | Firebird - United States Rainbird - Europe |
| Designer(s) | Snowball Nick Austin, Mike Austin and Pete Austin with additional help from Ian Buxton. Return to Eden Nick Austin and Chris Queen with art by Tim Noyce The Worm in Paradise Nick Austin, Mike Austin and Pete Austin with art by James Horsler |
| Engine | 32K virtual machine (custom) |
| Platform(s) | Amiga Amstrad CPC Apple II Atari 8-bit family Atari ST Commodore 64 DOS Macintosh MSX ZX Spectrum |
| Release date | 1986 |
| Genre(s) | Adventure game |
| Mode(s) | Single-player |
| Media | Compact Cassette or Floppy disk |
| System requirements | No special requirements |
| Input methods | Computer keyboard |
Silicon Dreams is a trilogy of interactive fiction games developed by Level 9 Computing during the 1980s. The first game was Snowball, released in 1983, followed a year later by Return to Eden, and then by The Worm in Paradise in 1985. The following year they appeared together in a bundle as the first, second and last of the Silicon Dreams. Early advertisements gave it the title of Silicon Dream, but was later pluralized.[1]
As most Level 9 games, the trilogy used a proprietary interpreted language called A-code and appeared on all major home computer platforms of the time, such as Amiga, Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum, on either diskette or cassette. Level 9 self-published each game separately, but the bundle was published by Telecomsoft, which sold it in the United Sates under the Firebird label and in Europe under the Rainbird label. The Rainbird release included a bonus: the novella Eden Song by Peter McBride. It served as an introduction to The Worm in Paradise.[1]
Contents |
[edit] Snowball
[edit] Plot
The game takes place during a time when the Human race is literally reaching for the stars. After linking the entire Solar System through accelerator chains, the "Big 5" nations of Earth (China, EEC, Pacific, US Empire and USSR) set in motion a plan to colonize the galaxy know as the Terran Expansionary Phase. It lasted ninety years from 2120 to 2210. The first step was to launch probes into outer space. The probes reported any Earth-sized planet they encountered during their voyage, which would last centuries. Each probe was followed by a survey ship, ten years later. The ship's mission was to map the planet and if it was habitable, it would signal Earth and then, while waiting for the colonists to arrive, it would terraform the planet.
Terraforming was a complex process. The survey ship needed to mine materials from asteroids to build a robot factory in space and this could take decades. The robots then proceeded to build more space factories that in turn would produce better robots. The robots also built large satellite dishes to collect data sent from Earth containing the latest technological advances. Then the actual terraforming took place. The robots landed on the planet and started to build cities while also launching more probes and survey ships further into space.
Once Earth received news of a habitable planet, the plan's third and final step took place. Ten giant passenger discs, each carrying two hundred thousand colonists in stasis, were towed into space. Next came the engine unit, which was linked a week later to the front of the discs, and then the colony ship was completed and ready to go. During the 2190s, fifty colony ships were launched from the EEC's Ceres base, among them the Snowball 9. It carried the first colonists for planet Eden on the Eridani A system. For the next three years, the accelerator chains beyond Pluto fired ten-ton blocks of ammonia ice at the travelling ship. The Snowball 9 caught the ice blocks with hooks and piled it around the passenger discs, forming a hollow shell that would cover most of the ship and would serve as a shield until it was needed to fuel the fusion engines on the later part of the trip. This ice shell gave the Snowball series its name.
After receiving the last ice block, the crew put the ship in autopilot and went to hibernate with the passengers, leaving the ship's maintenance to robots. Except for a brief period of activity to start deceleration, the crew slept for most of the trip, waking up one year before reaching Eden. The plan was to continue deceleration while consuming the last of the ice shell, and then put the ship in orbit around the planet, delivering the passengers down by gliders that would be retrieved by hooks to be reused.
As the Snowball 9 approached Eden, however, something went wrong. A crewmember became insane. She murdered her shipmates, destroyed the communication system and set the ship on a collision course with the sun. The robots, being little more than automata, continued their everyday operations oblivious to the danger but the ship's computer, capable of thinking, woke up secret agent Kim Kimberley before the deranged crewmember destroyed it. Kim Kimberley is a tall, athletic, intelligent woman with brown eyes and fair hair. She was born on September 29, 2172 AD, and was raised at Hampstead Crèche, which was closed when she was thirteen due to violations of the Android Protection Acts. She finished her education at the Milton Keynes School of Life in Malta, then returned to England for National Service. She started out doing standard security work with the occasional surveillance of subversive members of society, but ended working as a counter-espionage agent. Still in her twenties, Kim accepted to travel undercover on the Snowball 9 to be there as the last resort for the worst-case scenario, which she figures out is exactly what happened. She exits her modified stasis chamber with the goal of finding a way to reach the control room, armed with nothing but her wits and whatever tool she might find, and avert disaster.
[edit] Development
Snowball was originally released in 1983 and is noteworthy for including over 7,000 locations, more than the average adventure game of its day, when most games were played on home computers with small memory capacities. To achieve this, 6,800 of the locations of the passenger disks form a color-coded maze with minimal descriptions.[2] However, some locations received a more colorful treatment, such as: "You are floating in a flexible transpex tube through the central torus of a major freezer unit. Scaled up mechanisms are visible through the soft walls and, far below, a circular path surrounds you."
For some platforms it was later updated with updated text and new graphics for inclusion in the release of the Silicon Dreams trilogy in 1986.[3] There are also other, slight variations among the different ports of Snowball. In most versions, when Kim Kimberley activates certain mechanism found on the starting location, the consequence of this action is; "The lid above rises and a light comes on.. [sic]" However, some versions include a more colourfull description:
The lid above rises, a light comes on and a low voice murmurs beside your head, "Good Morning, Kim Kimberley. Please lie still while your metabolism stabilises: you have been hibernating for a long while." Treakly musak plays for a few minutes and then the voice returns, "Welcome to the interstellar colony spaceship, Snowball 9. As you'll have realised, you've been awakened while I am still in flight because we have a problem: my central control room has been occupied by a hijacker who is not - and please excuse my criticism of the human being - entirely sane. She seems obsessed with the idea of crashing into the sun. I've told her it's impossible but she just laughs. I'm sure you'll be more than a match for her, though, provided you avoid the Night.." The voice cuts off in mid-sentence.
Another peculiar aspect of the game was the confusion behind the main character's gender. In an interview for Sinclair User, Chris Bourne asked: "Is the androgynous Kim a man or woman?" Pete Austin pointed out that "there's a credit at the end for the design of 'Ms Kimberley's costume,'" but also admitted that Kim Kimberley was "a deliberately unisex name."[4] The debate came to an end with the release of Return to Eden, where it was made clear that Kim was not a man, because the surviving crewmembers confuse her with the woman who tried to destroy the ship.
[edit] Return to Eden
[edit] Plot
With the Snowball 9 orbiting Eden, the surviving crewmembers put Kim on trial. The only evidence against her is the "mempak" from the control room, which shows her as the hijacker rather than the savior. Despite the fact that the recording is damaged and thus is unreliable, they sentence her to death. About to be thrown into space, Kim manages to escape aboard a "stratoglider". An hour later, she lands on Eden, which is when the game starts.
The first thing the player must do is find a shelter for Kim, because a few moves into the game the Snowball 9 crew use the ship's engine to try to burn her down. The native robots take this as proof that the Snowball 9 is not the human ship they were expecting but a hostile alien craft they must destroy. The objective is to contact the robots before time runs out for the Snowball 9 and everyone aboard it.
[edit] Development
Unlike its predecessor, Return to Eden only had around 250 locations,[5] but it was the first game of the trilogy to feature graphics. The user could choose not to display them and play the game in text-only mode.
The game's first cover depicted a robot fighting a monster plant in Enoch. The robot resembled a comic book character, so to avoid legal troubles, Level 9 commissioned Godfrey Dowson to do a new cover. Dowson's illustration depicted another robot in the jungle looking towards Enoch. Level 9 wasn't satisfied with the result and asked Dowson to do it again. They liked the third cover so much, they hired Dowson to do artwork for the re-release of their old games as well as for their future titles.[6]
[edit] The Worm in Paradise
[edit] Plot
A hundred years after the arrival of colonists aboard the Snowball 9, planet Eden has become home to half a billion people. In this paradise run by robots there's no crime, no taxes, no unemployment, and no freedom. The population lives in domed "megapolis," and perhaps due to the war that took place during Return to Eden, there's no contact between the cities and the surrounding natural world. The occasional sighting of flying saucers keeps the population afraid from going outside.
The main character, a nameless citizen of Enoch, starts the game in a beautiful garden where everything seems fine. He picks an apple from a tree, a worm pops out, and the player follows it outside the garden, through the desert, and then he wakes up. It was only a Reveline simulation, one of the many forms of entertainment available under the reign of the third Kim. This "Garden of Eden as a prison" allegory sets the mood for the entire game. The objective is to explore the city, and while doing so the player must gather clues to unmask the government conspiracy behind the flying saucers.
[edit] Development
The trilogy's final installment is a departure from the previous games. It "evolved alongside a 12 month enhancement on Level 9's very own adventure system. Standard features include a 1,000 word vocabulary, a very highly advanced English input, memory enhancing-text compression, the now familiar and very much appreciated type-ahead, and multi-tasking so a player need never wait while a picture is drawn."[7]
Another departure is that the player has only seven days, within the game's clock, to complete the game. Quests are also time-based and require that the player arrive at certain locations at specific hours to achieve the desired goal. And while gameplay remains the same, the backdrop is no longer an action adventure, but a political thriller that resembles the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Similar to what happened when Snowball was released, there was certain confusion about the main character's identity and the time when the story took place. The Level 9 Fact Sheet says: "...a couple of years later, Kim Kimberley has become a legend on Eden."[1] Another article stated: "Worm in Paradise is set 100 years later. You are now Kim Kimberley III..."[8] Furthermore, Pete Austin said: "Worm is set on Eden, about 50 years in the future" and "The player is not Kim - she becomes mayor and runs the place."[4] Notice that these sources called the game by its original name, Worm in Paradise.
[edit] Reception
All games were released individually and received generally good initial reviews. Snowball won the Best Text-only Adventure prize at Crash 1984 Readers Awards.[9] When the trilogy was released it received unanimously, good reviews from the ZX Spectrum press: Sinclair User gave it a Sinclair User Classic,[10] Your Sinclair a Your Sinclair Mega Game,[11] and ZX Computing a Monster Hit.[12]
[edit] References
- ^ a b c Schmidt, Miron; Schulz, Manuel (1999-01-25). Level 9 Fact Sheet. The Interactive Fiction Archive. Retrieved on 2007-10-08.
- ^ Granade, Stephen. History of Interactive Fiction: Level 9. Brass Lantern. Retrieved on 2007-10-08.
- ^ Gerrard, Mike (May 1987). "YS Adventures: Silicon Dreams". Your Sinclair (15): 58.
- ^ a b Bourne, Chris (May 1985). "Hit Squad: On the level". Sinclair User (38): 60–62.
- ^ Price, Richard (January 1985). "Spectrum Software Scene: Snowbound in Eden". Sinclair User (34): 50.
- ^ Hewison, Richard. Level 9: Past masters of the adventure game. The Sinclair Lair. Retrieved on 2007-10-08.
- ^ Brewster, Derek (March 1986). "The Worm in Paradise". CRASH (26): 91–92.
- ^ Manor, John (August 1988). "8-bit product reviews: Silicon Dreams". ANTIC (vol. 7, no. 4): 41.
- ^ "Crash Readers Awards 1984" (Christmas special 1984/85). CRASH (12): 94–105.
- ^ Rook, Gary (February 1987). "Adventure review: Silicon Dreams". Sinclair User (59): 90.
- ^ Gerrard, Mike (March 1987). "YS Adventures: Silicon Dreams". Your Sinclair (15): 58.
- ^ Sweasey, Peter (March 1987). "AMindplay: Silicon Dreams". ZX Computing (8703): 90.
[edit] External links
- Nintendo DS port of Silicon Dreams available at Papafuji's DS Adventure Page
- The Level 9 Memorial
- Baf's Guide to the Interactive Fiction Archive
- Snowball review at Crash - The Online Edition
- Worm in Paradise review at Crash - The Online Edition
- Silicon Dreams trilogy at MobyGames
- Silicon Dreams trilogy at World of Spectrum
- Silicon Dreams trilogy at The Bird Sanctuary
- Eden Song available at Retro Reading: The Game Novellas Homepage
