First adapted IF with female protagonist?

Oo, good catch on the Livingston book. (Although that’s technically a little ambiguous if it’s meant to be literally you – that whole game is just odd in terms of character perspective.)

City Adventure technically only genderlocks the girlfriend (although I’m pretty sure based on the authors they mean a male main character in particular).

So, does this make Retief the first named protagonist in any computer game from adapted source material?

(With some sort of asterisk for the earlier appearance of James T. Kirk in Trek games, I suppose…)

I think so?

We’ve got Hammurabi as the named main character earlier, but it isn’t named off anything in particular.

HIGHNOON (1970) has the player face off against Black Bart but it also doesn’t seem to be a particular adaptation, and the PC is not named.

Okay, here’s one to beat them all so far…I think.

‘Dog Star Adventure’ by Lance Micklus was published by TSE/Softside for the TRS-80 in 1979 and featured Princess Leya of Star Wars fame. The misspelling of Princess Leia may have been intentional or may have been accidental.

This was later published as a BASIC type-in listing in SoftSide, vol. 1, no. 8, May 1979, pp. 8–15, 17-23 (reputedly the first ever type-in adventure) and ‘The Captain 80 book of BASIC adventures’.

She is a named protagonist in the instructions and in the game.

So is this a contender?

It looks like the princess is an object, not the player character.

True, but in the 8-Bit Text Adventures Facebook page on this same topic, you classified this as ‘part-time protagonist’. Isn’t this what you meant? Anyway, they’re your rules, so you can classify it however you like.

I apologize if my use of the term “protagonist” was unclear.

I would consider the “protagonist” of a conventional text adventure a character that we have some level of direct parser control over. Something more direct than the protagonist issuing a command to a clearly separate character (FLOYD, GO NORTH doesn’t mean that we are Floyd, it means that the protagonist can give Floyd instructions which he will then follow).

From Maher’s writeup on The Dark Crystal (the game I connected to the term “part-time protagonist”):

Unusually, the game is played in the third person, with you guiding the actions of the movie’s hero Jen and, later, both Jen and his eventual sidekick/tentative love interest, Kira. The duality of this is just odd; you never quite know who will respond to your commands.

Dark Crystal seems to be a muddy-water kind of game because of the unusual storytelling style, but I would not consider a character object that only exists to be TAKEn or TALKed or whatever to be a “protagonist.”

I also connected Hitchhiker’s to the term “part-time protagonist” because Trillian is both an object in a room and the first-person-perspective of a short vignette in the game (such that >WHO AM I responds “You are Trillian.”)

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It looks like it’s pretty clearly intended to be the character as portrayed by Sigorney Weaver, too, though it’s not a fantastic rendition of her. (I mean, it’s way better than anything I can draw, just not fantastic.)

There’s maybe a bit of a wrinkle here that’s specific to Alien, though I’m not sure how much it applies, given the illustration in the ad: Dan O’Bannon has said that he intentionally avoided using gendered first names in his script for the film because he wanted to avoid restricting who could be cast for each character. (Although he has also said that he wanted part of the body-horror element to be a sort of “male pregnancy” plot – not a direct quote – so I suppose that locks down the sex of Kane.) In any case, supposing we take O’Bannon at his word, Ripley was not written as a Strong Female Character, but simply as a gender-neutral protagonist who happens to be brave and resourceful.

But, again, the game doesn’t seem to say “I’m Ellen” (a name not given to Ripley until the first sequel, in any case), and the packaging pretty clearly references the original film, not the script, so I’m not sure how relevant this is.

I have constructed an extraordinarily convoluted and bogus argument that John Laird’s game Haunt (1979-82) has a female protagonist adapted from mainstream media.

My argument is here and derives from Jason Dyer’s account of a puzzle solution here and some background here [warning: anti-Romani prejudice].

Relatively short version, which spoils an unusual puzzle in the game:

The game says that the mansion is willed to the founder’s only descendant. A note in house reveals (obliquely) that the founder is the father of Basil St. John from the Brenda Starr comic strip and mentions his daughter. You have to have chosen the last name St. John at the beginning of the game in order to be able to solve a certain puzzle. Since there’s only one descendant, and by patrilineal naming conventions the daughter’s children wouldn’t be named St. John, you must be playing as the daughter, Starr Twinkle St. John.

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