Games - MacVenture

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	Games - MacVenture

The MacVenture games is a series of four adventure games introducing a characteristic drag-and-drop interface. They were originally developed for the Mac by ICOM Simulations:

Deja Vu: a Nightmare Comes True (1985)
Uninvited (1986)
Shadowgate (1987)
Deja Vu II: Lost in Las Vegas (1988)

All these games have been released on other platforms including Commodore Amiga, Apple II, Atari ST, Commodore 64, IBM PC, PocketPC and NES. This article is about the original Macintosh versions which introduced new interface ideas to the adventure game genre and were blueprints for the other versions.

History

The MacVenture engine was written in 1985 for the first game in the series, Deja Vu. Making the entire game fit together with system software on two 400 k single-sided floppy disks proved to be quite a challenge and special image compression routines had to be written to accomplish this.

Deja Vu was awarded SPA excellence in software awards for Best Entertainment Product and Best New World in 1986 as the first genuine point-and-click adventure game. The MacVenture interface saw no significant changes for the remaining three games.

A handful of sequels such as Beyond Shadowgate and Shadowgate 64 were later made, with only the background story in common with the MacVenture games. The rights to the MacVentures are currently maintained by Infinite Ventures.

The "MacVenture" name was used in loading screens and about boxes – in the original releases for other platforms it was translated, e.g. "Atari Venture" or "PC Venture". MacVenture is the only of these used for referring to the game series in other contexts.

Developers

The MacVenture team had the following contributors to all four titles:

Darin Adler
(primary developer)
Steve Hays
Waldemar Horwat
David Marsh (graphics)
Terry Schulenburg (as 'Schulenberg' in Deja Vu)
Todd Squires
Jay Zipnick

The following people had part in the development of some of the games, as noted:

Mitch Adler (Deja Vu II)
Fred Allen (Deja Vu II)
Brian Baker (Deja Vu II)
Scott Berfield (producer/designer: Uninvited, producer: Deja Vu, Shadowgate)
Ed Dluzen (Deja Vu II)
Craig Erickson (Deja Vu, Uninvited)
Dave Feldman (Uninvited, Shadowgate, Deja Vu II)
David Marsh (Uninvited, Shadowgate, Deja Vu II)
Michael Manning (Deja Vu II)
Kurt Nelson (Deja Vu)
Karl Roelofs (graphics: Shadowgate, Deja Vu II)
Paul Snively (Deja Vu II)
Julia Ulano (Deja Vu II)
Mark Waterman (Deja Vu, Uninvited)
Billy Wolfe (Uninvited)
Tod Zipnick (Uninvited, Shadowgate, Deja Vu II)

Features

The game interface is laid out in a once-novel "desktop" style which meaning that objects are taken by dragging and dropping them into the inventory, there are regular menu commands such as "Save as…". Multiple objects can be selected and used at once with the shift key, and there is even a "Clean up" command which sorts out the inventory in the same way as in the Finder (unlike the Finder, there is also a "Mess up" command). Much as with any non-game application, the various game windows can be rearranged according to taste and the font of the text window changed as well. The MacVentures use the Macintosh's built in widget toolkit for the user interface which adds to the feeling of the game as a regular application.

Unlike Sierra's or LucasArts' classic adventure games, MacVentures are played in first-person perspective. The player's current view is displayed in a graphics window accompanied by a symbolic birds-eye view of exits in a side window. The name of the current location is displayed as the title of the graphics window similar to an open document in e.g. a word processor. A characteristic feature is the "self" window which provides a reference to the player himself for putting on clothes and the like.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for MacVenture ]

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