A book that came with a computer game

Tale of Kerovnia - G. Sinclair

I really shouldn't have added this book to Goodreads because it seems that they want real books and this is basically a novella that came as part of an old Commodore 64 (actually Amiga) game called The Pawn. Okay, this was a proper story that set the background for the game, and that a lot of games were released with novellas, but in reality the only real purpose this book served was as a means of copy protection. Basically 100 moves into the game it would pick a random section of the book (page number, line number, word number) and ask you to enter the word, which meant that you had to have the book. However computer game pirates are not stupid, and basically they all ended up photocopying the novella at their local library. As for reading it, I wonder if I was the only person that actually do that (not that I can remember what it was about) namely because it gave no hints for the game, and the main reason we bought the game was for the game and not the novella.

Anyway, the Pawn was apparently one of those revolutionary computer games because it had really good graphics. In fact the graphics were so good (for the time) that it won a number of awards. Once again, the reason for those rewards baffle me a bit because as a game (despite being hard) was pretty ordinary. I recently played through it on my Commodore 64 emulator (yes, I have a cheat sheet) and, yeah, it seriously is a pretty ordinary game.

It is what is called Interactive Fiction. Back in those days we called them adventure games. This was before the days of World of Warcraft, and if we wanted a fantasy roleplaying game (because many of them were incredibly basic back then) we would resort to these types of games. In fact they were immensely popular, and I guess it not only had something to do with the puzzle solving aspect of the game, but also because of the fantasy and science-fiction elements. As I said, in these days this was the closest we could get to World of Warcraft.

As I said, as a game it was pretty ordinary, and in fact, despite the pretty pictures, it was not all that groundbreaking. The first such game was a game called Colossal Cave (it predates Dungeons and Dragons), and the Zork trilogy was actually a lot more ground breaking that this particular game. However, I guess at the time they needed to give somebody an award for that year, so it most likely would've gone to the game with the prettiest graphics.

Source: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/491351128