Video games - Snowball

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	Video games - Snowball

Snowball was the first game in the Silicon Dreams Trilogy, a series of text adventure games featuring the player in the character of "Kim Kimberly", by Level 9 Computing released in 1983. The game revolved around the space colonisation sleeper ship "Snowball 9" sent to the planet Eden in the Eridani A system carrying 2,000,000 colonists in hibernation. In the game, security agent Kim Kimberly is awakened in transit to Eden due to sabotage on the ship.

The game is set in the year 2304 and you were cast as secret agent Kim Kimberley, whose mission was to protect the ship and its cargo. Level 9 deliberately chose an asexual name so that the player could imagine themselves as male or female.

Snowball was noteworthy for including many more locations, more than 7,000, than the average adventure game of its day, when most games were played on home microcomputers with small memory capacities. To achieve this effect, Snowball 9 is formed out of ten passenger discs where the rooms are identical from disc to disc.

While 6,800 of those locations formed a color-coded maze with minimal descriptions, some of the other locations offer imaginative descriptions of high quality:

YOU ARE ON A SIGNIFICANT CYLINDRICAL LEDGE ABOVE STEPS TO A TOROIDAL WALKWAY. TRANSPEX TUBES LEAD AWAY THROUGH A MAZE OF WIRES AND MACHINERY.

and

THE SOUTH WALL IS A WAVERY AND OBSCURE CONFUSION OF FLICKERY VIDS.

The game utilised Level 9's A-code interpreted language and was released for a number of platforms, including the ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC and Commodore 64.

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Video games - Snowball

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