Marie Celeste
As I've said before text adventure games were always on the menu when I was growing up. I enjoyed reading, in fact I spent most of my spare time either reading or colouring in. I particularly loved stories of mystery and ghosts, so when Dad brought home a copy of a game called Marie Celeste I was very interested.
I was even happier to discover that we weren't aboard a deserted sea faring vessel but a deserted space vessel with a skull and cross bones on the side ( published by Atlantis Software in 1984. ). Like many adventure games of the time it came with a list of words it recognised and a brief plot line but the rest was down to you. I immediately transported myself to the deserted starship Enterprise , ready to do battle and find the rest of the crew( or at least steal any items written in green inverted text that I could find. )
Where as in The Hobbit you had to get a little way into the game to get the feeling you were being followed, in this game the feeling of impending doom starts very early on. Notice those faint footsteps? They aren't going to go away, my father's reaction of 'kill footsteps' was not understood by the computer ( or most of the population) , so we continued onwards ( with memories of the wine cellar from The Hobbit in our minds).
Told you those footsteps were up to no good! " Daaaaaaaad , it's an android " "Do we have a screwdriver ?" ( actual conversation ) . Needless to say, asking the android to wait while we took it's legs off was not an option. But it certainly showed that text adventures can still be exciting and exciting very quickly into the adventure as well.
But the great thing about this adventure ( very much like the wine cellar in The Hobbit) is that this is all part of the adventure, and if you've collected a certain item before you are caught this is actually a very handy part of the adventure. If you haven't collected the item I'm afraid it's time to press the big Q button and try again.
I think this exciting start is why the memories of this text adventure have stayed with me so long. Plus the fact that I love sci-fi so the whole adventure really appealed to me . It was another game that I never finished, it was another game by Atlantis Software , which it's only now I realise just how much of their software I played.