Game: Enchanted Scepters
Year: 1986
Status: Abandonware
Playing on: PCE/MacPlus emulator
The game to kick off this blog is Enchanted Scepters by Silicon Beach Software and released exclusively on early Macintosh computers. This game was the inspiration for the creation of this blog. It is the first game listed in the "Art of Point and Click Adventure Games" book I am slowly working through. The book claims that Enchanted Scepters is the first point-and-click adventure game of all time, so I was surprised to see so little of it on the internet. YouTube appears to have a grand total of three videos on it, and there isn't much more to be found on the other corners of the internet. I figured that this game deserved a bit more, and thus the motivation to start this blog was born.
Let's dive into the little history that appears to be known about this game. Despite what my book says, Wikipedia claims Enchanted Scepters is not the first P&C game. According to them, although the copyright date on the game's box is listed as 1984, it was not actually released until 1986, which would give the title of "first P&C adventure game" to another title. But does release date really matter in this kind of debate? I'm inclined to think that whichever game was created first deserves the claim to fame, but unfortunately there is no way of figuring that particular detail out. Regardless, Enchanted Scepters is one of the earliest games in the genre, one of the first Macintosh games that utilized digitized sound, and is certainly is a fun starting point for my trek.
There are few sources online that reference ES. The May 1986 edition of MacUser magazine had a brief review of the game. The author was positive towards most aspects of the game. Most interestingly, she dedicated a lot of praise towards the mouse controls. It's easy to take for granted nowadays, but computer mice were still a new periphery for most people in 1986, and playing a game with one (I imagine) was still a novelty. Much of the marketing around this game centered around novelties. The box exclaims that ES is a "text-graphic-sound adventure game," which is every buzzword avaliable to the gaming industry in 1986. MacUser mentioned that the MSRP price for the game was $39.95, which is roughly $100 dollars in today's money (not to mention that you also had to own a ~$7000 computer to run it). A MacWorld review mentioned that the game would "probably take about a week’s worth of casual play to complete." Novelty has a price apparently, both financially and in opportunity cost.
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| Box art. Credit to Ye Olde Infocomme Shoppe |
ES was developed in part to serve as a tech-demo of Silicon Beach's "World Builder" game engine. The engine itself seemed to receive more attention than the game itself, as it got a multi-page feature in MacWorld. The fact that their engine was able to digitize real-life audio recordings and output it through the Macintosh's internal speakers was a big deal. Designed by Bill Appleton, it was originally intended to be a simple-to-use tool for the creation of adventure games, but the MacWorld feature goes even further and suggests that it may be useful in both business and therapeutic settings. While there is no evidence to suggest World Builder was used in that way, it enjoyed some small amount of success. Released in 1986, and eventually made into freeware in 1995, there was a small community dedicated to the engine throughout the 80s and 90s. A number of shareware titles were produced using it, with care being taken to preserve them up until as recently as 2020. However, Silicon Beach were never to release another game on the World Builder engine, so ES remains the sole commercialized game built upon it.
Now onto the actual game! Well almost, as before being able to play this I had to setup a Macintosh emulator (not something I'd have ever thought I'd do). PCE/MacPlus worked well for me. You just run the .bat file once it's downloaded, and you are good to go! I downloaded ES from the Internet Archive as a .img file (which is the .ISO of the floppy disk world) and used that file to replace the generic .img file the emulator used by default. The MacUser review mentioned that the game took upwards of two and a half minutes to load on a 512k system. That's how long it took for me to install the game, and it loads instantaneously. Thanks emulation.
Upon opening the game, there is no title or splash screen. You are thrust immediately into the first scene of the game: your bedroom. The premise of the game is that your homeland is under attack. As the apprentice to the court wizard, your duty is to find him the four scepters he needs to repel the invading forces. After getting your quest from the king, the game lets you loose. There is very little direction and is fairly open world.
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| Opening scene |
I don't intend for these posts to be a play-by-play of my time in a game. That would take forever. I instead want them to serve as a place for specific anecdotes I found enjoyable and to as an in-progress review.
I've played ES for a bit over an hour so far and am a bit over 25% of the way through the game. Compared to the Infocom text games I've played, the parser in this is terrible. Common shortcuts aren't recognized (like using "n" to go north) and the vocabulary it uses is limited. This is sorta made up for with its inclusion of mouse controls, as it is quicker to click on the attack command rather than type "cast lightning spell". Unfortunately the mouse movement has some sort of weird acceleration and is awkward to use. I am not sure if this is an issue with the emulator or if old Macintosh computers were just like that.
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| I swear that early adventure games all had jokes written by the same person |
So far, this game essentially is Zork but with graphics. It's a collection-a-thon, it uses very similar humor, and has fairly similar combat. ES has thus far emphasized its combat Zork did though. There are combat encounters generally every few scenes, which honestly just means that I have to reload a lot more often than in Zork. You can aim for specific body parts, but there is no clear documentation as for why one would do this. My guess is that you look at their character and try to aim for where they don't have armor, but without more information it's hard to be sure. So far I've mostly attacked without aiming for a specific body part.
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| The characters you come across in this game are unsettling |
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| This dude is a thing of nightmares |
The early Machintosh computers that this was released on had a monochromatic screen but boasted a high resolution than many other popular computers at the time. This leads to some interesting looking graphics. On one hand, the lack of color makes it look dated, but the image is sharper than what I tend to expect from the mid-1980s. This serves the environmental design great. The character design though is unintentionally creepy and off-putting. Characters oftentimes take up huge chunks of the screen, which makes the fact that they are flat and still all the more apparent. The disjointed audio does not help. The game has been silent for 95% of my playtime, but on certain screens and during combat, there are occasional bursts of crackling digitized audio. While the quality was considered groundbreaking upon release, nowadays it only adds to the uncanny feeling this game exudes. I can tell that their audio snippets were recorded in real life, but the way they interject into an otherwise silent scene comes off as disjointed.
The setting has been the best part of the game so far. For the first 45 minutes of gameplay, I was exploring what felt like a normal fantasy world. I dealt with crazy alchemists and priests, charmed a snake, and prayed to god for a magic wand. And then out of nowhere, while I was heading into the southern desert for the first time, I was jumped by a man with a machine gun. The juxtaposition of exploring a fantasy world with then hearing the spray of machine gun fire was surprising to say the least. Thankfully my medieval era equipment was able to defeat him, so while bringing a knife to a gunfight might be a bad idea, evidently a sword will work out perfectly fine.
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| A sword is mightier than a machine gun, apparently |
If anyone else who has played this (especially if you played it back in the 1980s) comes across this, please leave a comment! There are only two contemporary reviews of this game that have survived till the present day, so getting more firsthand accounts of Enchanted Scepters would be great. I'll hopefully continue my playthrough over the next week. We'll see how many more posts it warrants, but at the moment I'm leaning towards just one.
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