Acheton
In 1971, the University of Cambridge bought an IBM 3084 mainframe
that was very cheap but also very obsolete. The computer laboratory
spent quite some time bringing it up to date. They named it Phoenix,
quipping that while the classic Phoenix rose from the ashes, this one
rose from the crashes.
When it was up and running, they wrote an interactive fiction game. Its main claim to fame is that it is the largest game of this type ever written, roughly three times the size of the Colossal Cave Adventure. It was the first "die and reload" adventure, you would die permanently and unexpectedly, a feature that later became very popular in the Space Quest series.
In 1984 Acheton was released commercially for the BBC by Acornsoft, 1987 for the PC by Topologika; in 2000 it was rebuilt for the Z-machine and now should be playable on nearly any platform.
Perhaps the first adventure game written outside the U.S. was "Acheton" (c. 1979), by Jon Thackray and David Seal, with contributions by Jonathan Partington, working in the mathematics department of Cambridge University, England. "Acheton" is an enormous cave game, whose name is a confection of "Acheron" (the river that dead used to cross in order to get to Hades) and "Achates" (minor character in Virgil's "Aeneid"), based around exploration and collecting treasures.
Thackray and Seal devised one of the earliest adventure-design systems (which although basically an assembler was influential on for instance the modern design system "Inform") and it was publically used on the Cambridge IBM mainframe ("Phoenix") until the mid-1990s.
Acornsoft, then the software arm of Acorn Computers Ltd., also based in Cambridge and with strong links to the university, published a conversion of "Acheton" to the BBC Micro, on two 100K floppy discs (one containing the game, one containing hints). "Kingdom of Hamil" and other games followed.
Posted 2000-09-10 to rec.games.int-fiction
No major spoilers included.
Note: Acheton is one of the games originally built on the "Phoenix" mainframe recently recovered and re-built for the Z-Machine by Graham Nelson, Adam Atkinson, and Gunther Schmidl. This review is based on a pre-release version of the Z-machine port.
Acheton is one of the very earliest adventure games, preceded most significantly by ADVENT (Colossal Cave) and mainframe Zork. It is a game much influenced by those games (there's even a hollow voice), with the main differences being that it is MUCH larger and (as expected from the Phoenix crew) quite a bit tougher and more cruel. It starts by warning you of its difficulty, and then underscores the point. A smug veteran of Colossal Cave quickly finds the familiar lamp and keys, heads down to that oh-so-familiar grate, opens it up, goes down, falls into a well and dies. This is a wakeup call — and you had better get used to such instant deaths, because there are a lot of them in Acheton.
Acheton is unapologetically a cave crawl, a treasure hunt. Those who play IF strictly for the story line will find none here. The game is divided, as was customary, into a short beginning section, a much larger midgame, and an endgame or "master game" section for those who completed the treasure hunt. In Acheton, the midgame is subdivided into several sections; you enter it in the largest section but there are other large sections reachable by solving certain puzzles.
The beginning game, despite a few instant deaths which most players will encounter, is fairly easy; there are no treasures to be found and by wandering around you will soon find yourself with nothing to do but the right thing. The middle game is mostly set in caves, so you're going to need that brass lamp; unfortunately, that brass lamp has a limited amount of power, which therefore limits your time in the caves. This "lamp time" restriction is an IF custom which has fortunately gone out of favor; it won't limit your exploration of Acheton much, but it does mean that when you go for the win, you're going to need to plan things very carefully.
Upon entering the middle game section with the trusty brass lamp, you quickly find a treasure — a mink coat with bulging pockets! (All treasures in Acheton have a '!' in their descriptions, again a custom of the time). Take it, and (as you are probably at least half-expecting by now)... you die. Another reminder — this place can be cruel. Fortunately the solution to this puzzle is near to hand, and this rebuilds your confidence enough that you continue. Some exploring locates a few treasures just lying around (and some of them don't even kill you), many other items, a magic word scrawled on a wall, and a safe. This last is open, and closing it results in
A deep sonorous booming voice intones slowly:
NOTHING??!!
WHAT A CHEEK! THAT'S NOT NEARLY ENOUGH. BEGONE!!
followed by the collapse of the cave and the character's death. Yes, another instadeath, but now you know where to put the loot, and you're ready for the long haul. And it will be a _long_ haul. The mid-game consists of (depending on how you count them) three major areas each subdivided into several smaller areas, plus a few other minor areas which stand on their own. These constitute literally hundreds of rooms. There are over 50 treasures, at least 8 mazes, countless ways to die, several magic words and magic objects, and plenty of puzzles. There's pirates and monsters and natural hazards, and even a god to contend with. If you make it through all of this, there's the master game, which is unfortunately something of a disappointment; two simple puzzles, really. And yes, there's a Last Lousy Point.
References to Colossal Cave and Zork are common, but they are references, not slavish copies; there's a three foot rod with a rusty star on the end and some fissures, but you won't be creating any crystal bridges. Nor will you find a spinning magnet above the Zorkish lodestone room, and there's a pillow that won't help you with any Ming vase.
Acheton, by the standards of its day, is a top-notch game. There are a few blemishes, like an occasional "guess the verb" or "guess the noun" puzzle. Some puzzles and treasures are insufficiently clued, leaving the player to try to try everything everywhere to get those last treasures, which is a tough job in a game this big. But these are few and the game overall is very playable, though quite cruel (save early, save often, for your next step may be your last). By the standards of today, it has many flaws. It has a two-word parser which occasionally frustrates ("but I want to drink the clean water from the barrel, not the murky water from the bottle"). It lacks 'examine', which is something of a mixed blessing — often you want to know more about an item, but at least you know there isn't anything you missed through insufficient use of 'examine'. It has many IF cliches now in disfavor — it's a cave crawl, with lamp time, mazes, and yes, a dragon. When the player is tempted to write a Java program to discover a Hamiltonian path through a maze, the maze is perhaps a bit too difficult. But despite all that, it holds up well, and I certainly enjoyed playing it.
If you're the type who whipped through Colossal Cave in half an hour and begged for more or if you played Fyleet, Crobe, and Sangraal and liked them, you already know you want to play Acheton.
If you got into IF with Zork and Colossal Cave and other cave crawls, and enjoyed them, you definitely want to play Acheton. It will probably be helpful to play some of the smaller Phoenix games — Fyleet and Crobe in particular — to acquaint you with the "feel" of the games.
If you turn your nose up at cave crawls, like puzzle-less IF, and insist on a story and a natural-language parser, forget it — but you've probably already stopped reading this review.
