Does anyone remember Perils at Paramount?

General
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At least I’m pretty sure it was called Perils at Paramount. It was a text adventure I played around three decades ago, must have been shareware/freeware, where you had to search around a film studio lot to collect all the pages of your lost script in time for a pitch meeting. I never managed to make much progress before time ran out (there sure were a lot of perils—electrified water, a mischievous baby, script pages inside a hot oven for some reason), but I had fun trying. It feels weird to have distinct memories of something that has zero hits on Google, but I thought maybe someone else out there would remember it!

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That sounds like Tinseltown Blues (haven’t played it myself, though).

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Whoa. I just played a little bit, and this is totally the game, except slightly different! There are some details that don’t feel right, and 2002 seems way too late…I wonder if my dad somehow ended up with an early version of this game. Fascinating.

Thanks so much for helping me with this mystery! I will definitely be playing more to see what other memories come back to me.

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Type INFO, ABOUT and CREDITS. You’ll see that the game has an interesting history, “Initially started in Pascal, but never completed, Tinseltown Blues was revived in 1995 when I discovered Inform.”

It may be that your dad had access to an early version before it was published for Spring Thing in 2002.

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I’ve never played Tinseltown Blues, but I’m super curious how your dad ended up with an early version of the game!

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Yeah, this is kind of blowing my mind! My dad used to play text adventures with me before he got busy with other things (adults!), but then he would find shareware/freeware games for me to play, so it could have been something like that, if the '80s/'90s version was released publicly. The ABOUT text says it was never completed, and yet I definitely played a version of this game with a different title, and I’m pretty sure it was a monster costume rather than a chicken suit, and I could swear there were three vials at the infirmary…

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