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Nine Princes in Amber
(Filmtrack/Telarium, 1985, Apple//e)Back in the heydays of adventure gaming, Sierra On-line devoted time to making graphic-intense adventures, while Infocom centered on text-adventures. Telarium (a.k.a. Filmtrack), was somewhere in between, with little interactive versions of books made by renowned authors. While their first game Amazon was created with the help of the company's founder, Michael Crichton, later games were made by other author heavyweights, like Roger Zelazny. The end result is Nine Princes in Amber; one of the most under-appreciated graphic adventures of the mid-1980's.
The intrigue of this story (and the game) was in the princely deck of tarot cards; each prince (or princess) being represented by one card. Princes had the power to communicate via all other princes through these cards, and furthermore, could transport themselves to wherever their siblings are, by "entering" the card. This is a piece of brilliant imaginative whimsy that would later be adopted by the enter-a-book storyline of games like Myst and Riven, and is sure to be used by many games in the future. Hey; how about putting it in a modern Nine Princes game...? Fans of Zelazny are waiting. See also: Amazon; Amazon: Guardians of Eden (reviews),
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me a major Zelazny fan, but I really liked Nine Princes in Amber.
In fact, I loved the game so much, I immediately bought most (if not all)
of the entire book series. Why hasn't the Amber book saga been made into a
3D adventure by now, or better yet, a TV or movie series...? All the
aspects of cool sci-fi and fantasy are there, when Corwin (who is your
character in the game) discovers he is one of nine princes in a magical
realm, each of whom have the "power of shadow." This means you
can manipulate the world around you, so you can instantly be at any time,
any place, with any clothing you desire. Sure, this was a game in the
floppy disk age of gaming, so you could only go to places according to the
original novel. It still was a cool game though.