IF works adapted to other genres / media?

Yes, I remember this being mentioned before and regretting I’d missed it. If it’s ever revived I’ll be sure to catch it! Alias ‘The Magpie’ is a game that I imagine would lend itself quite readily to dramatic adaptation.

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Thanks - VNs are not something I’ve really explored at all, but I will pay them some attention now - especially as I have a child suddenly interested in anime (although he’s too young for most of it).

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Right, here we go. I’ve uploaded all the clips of the play that I have, and here’s the “script” (really just a set of directions for the improvisers) which might help you make sense of the clips!

Alias ‘The Magpie’ : The Bearded Victoria

Scene 01

The Auctioneer (Liam), is busy inspecting the lots at the auction house. (He could even auction off one or two items.) He is approached by Sir Rodney Playfair, alias the ‘Magpie’, (Jason) a gentleman thief, who tells him that he has seen a very fine Royal Doulton teapot at a jumble sale in the next village. The auctioneer is an avid collector of Royal Doulton. In an aside to the audience, the ‘Magpie’ confides that he himself planted it there. The auctioneer replies that he must cycle there immediately and secure it before somebody else buys it, but he is due to start the auction. What is he to do? The ‘Magpie’ reassures him that he himself is a dab hand at auctioneering, and will cover for him. When the auctioneer has gone, the ‘Magpie’ dons a moustache identical to the auctioneer’s, and is now impersonating him. In an aside to the audience, he explains that lot number one is the bearded Victoria, which he intends to steal. He shows the audience his hollowed out auction catalogue, with the fake stamp inside.

Scene 02

Lady Hamcester (Mim) and her brother, Major Hilary Buff-Orpington (Greg), arrive at the auction room and begin looking for Lord Hamcester. The Major looks in silly places, such as under peoples’ seats, whilst Lady Hamcester tut tuts. They cannot find him, and are forced to settle down when the ‘Magpie’ bangs his gavel and begins the auction.

Lot number 1 is the famous bearded Victoria stamp. It is brought in by Constable Cramp (Kevin), who is disguised as In an auction house employee. The ‘Magpie’ creates a distraction, enabling him to switch the two stamps. He auctions off the fake stamp (someone in the audience will have to bid on this - Laura?) and hides the real one in a hollowed-out auction catalogue.

Scene 03

The auction house worker (Kevin) approaches the table and tells the ‘Magpie’ that he wants a word. He reveals that he is actually Constable Cramp, of Scotland Yard, working undercover. He has heard on the grapevine that the notorious ‘Magpie’ plans to steal the bearded Victoria, and warns the ‘auctioneer’ to be on his guard. Whilst the Magpie’s back is turned, we see Lady Hamcester and the Major approach the auctioneer’s table.

The Major has brought along a flying insect in a jar, which he shows to Lady Hamcester. He releases it, and Lady Hamcester takes the ‘Magpie’'s auction catalogue from the desk, telling the Major to swat it. The Major takes the book and runs around the room attempting to swat it. Lady Hamcester points out where it’s gone, including settling on the heads of the guests, etc. (It flies off before he swats them!) The Magpie realises what is going on and attempts to retrieve the book. The scene ends with the three of them running around the auction room.

Scene 04

The Major now has the book containing the genuine Bearded Victoria, and the ‘Magpie’ now needs to get it back! He thinks quickly. He says to the Major “Good grief, man? Let me look at your eyeballs!” after peering at them he says, “Have you been in the Amazon lately?” after the Major answers yes, he says “Thought so! I used to be an explorer myself, before I became an auctioneer. Unless I’m mistaken, you have Amazonian flu!” The Major and Lady Hamcester are alarmed, but the Magpie reassures them that the cure is simple – the Major must get his circulation going – by doing 20 star jumps. “Here, let me take that book.”

Whilst the Major is busy doing star jumps, Constable Cramp appears and demands to know what is going on. The Magpie takes him aside and explains that the Major is trying to communicate, in the form of an interpretive dance, that the Bearded Victoria has been stolen! He interprets for the Constable, and describes the thief. The description is ridiculous, but the constable writes it down and runs off to find the thief. On his way out, he runs into the auctioneer, who is returning from his fruitless mission to buy a teapot.

When Lady Hamcester sees the Magpie and the Auctioneer together, she can’t tell them apart. The Magpie makes up something about being the auctioneer’s long lost twin, leading to an absurd conversation.

(We’ll have to improvise the rest – the important thing is that the Magpie gets away with the Bearded Victoria in the end – the rest we can make up!)

The auctioneer announces the next lot, a fabulous jewelled scarab, a Cheops of the third dynasty.

The brilliant Liam Brennan plays the auctioneer. But of course, when I’m wearing my false moustache, you really can’t tell us apart…

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What about Aaron Reed’s work Subcutanean? Which I think qualifies as an IF work “adapted” to other media because it uses a custom-built engine to generate procedurally unique printed (ink and paper) novels.

Otherwise, I’d say the most obvious adaptation of old-school IF is the official Choose Your Own Adventure movie.

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Subcutanean was created to be what it is. It hasn’t been adapted from another interactive form. (Or any other form at all.) The engine is a custom writing tool, not an IF game.

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Fair enough that Subcutanean isn’t an adaptation in the sense that the OP was asking about :nerd_face:

But I’d still say that Subcutanean is a genre/media “adaptation” because, unlike a traditional printed IF book (e.g. CYOA) where the reader is the one making the choices, this time it’s the author (and their custom writing tool) that’s making the choices. So it’s a kind of a “reverse/inverse” IF work, which I will never stop finding fascinating :smile_cat:

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Aha… I knew I’d eventually rediscover one of the ones I couldn’t think of, during my regular updating/trawling of our archives…

Adrian Owens, now writing as Adrian Powell-Owens, has turned his 1985 text adventure…
The Kingdom of Spelldome
https://solutionarchive.com/game/id%2C1246/Kingdom+of+Spelldome%2C+The.html

…into a whole series of books…
search Kingdom of Spelldome, on your usual bookselling sites; such as Amazon

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Dead thread, I know but I’ve just remembered another ZX Spectrum game series adapted to a book as I’ve just interviewed the author. :slight_smile:

A Brief Tale by Jon Scott https://smile.amazon.co.uk/Brief-Tale-Jon-Scott/dp/1844011941
…based on the characters from his 1990s series of text adventures, published by Zenobi Software and WoW Software.

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…Some more text adventures that served as inspiration for their author’s later published works, just for my own reference, really… so I’ll remember that I posted them here when the topic comes up again…

Raymond Johnson was inspired by his 1989 GAC-ed game Forgotten Island to produce a whole series of novels… Effluo Insula

Andy McDermott’s 1999 Psion 5 text adventure, Grave Robber was the spark that inspired his whole series of bestselling novels starting with The Hunt for Atlantis that might well end up as a Netflix series in the future.

Andy still dabbles with retro-style text adventures every so often. In fact, he produced one this year called Italianate that he has just turned into a novel.

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Wow - straight from Quill into print! Prototyping novels in a retro text game engine is pretty inspiring. Thanks for sharing these.

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Once upon a time, in the quaint little village of Haelstowne…

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I personally would be interested in text games being adapted to larger graphical games. That seems like the natural analogy to a novel or short story being adapted to a movie. It would be really interesting if someone made a $100m AAA game adapted from a text game (though I might not play it :smiley: ).

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I feel like Myst kind of did this, and it was a huge commercial success. I wonder if people would be ready for a graphical Hadean Lands. Counterfeit Monkey would be cool, but only if all the 3d models were made of words like the kid’s show Word World.

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I feel like Myst kind of did this

The story is that the designers did some early playtesting of Myst in a role-played, “You see X, what do you do?” format. But it wasn’t an adaptation of an actual text game. The puzzles are all designed to be apprehended visually (or, in some cases, aurally) and manipulated with the mouse/hand. If you went the other way (a textual Myst game) you’d be redesigning all the puzzles from scratch.

I’ve always thought that Spider and Web could be reimagined as a 3D stealth game alternating with dialogue (monologue) scenes. But, again, you’d be redesigning all the actual puzzles to make sense in a stealth game loop.

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I think many IF games would adapt beautifully to touchscreen, even without flashy graphics. I’ve been beating this drum for a while. Look at what a smashing success the adaptation of A Dark Room was for touchscreen. There is money to be made, if someone with the oomph did it. People like good stories. They just don’t like typing.

Hadean Lands is a brilliant choice for this, and so is Counterfeit Monkey. I can just see the little letter-remover icon where you spin a little alphabet wheel to the letter you want. My first choice for an adaptation would be Art DiBianca’s The Wand, which could be beautifully adapted with the color combinations for the wand. Then HL or CM.

Somebody who knows how should really do this, provided the authors were amenable.

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Yes!! That would be perfect!

I’ve been buying Ming-dynasty vases in bulk the past couple of years. But you have hit the button! Let me throw graphically advanced machines with their associated viewscreens against already prettily printer-inked and monitor-graveled walls.

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This question actually made me think of Hadean Lands too – at first, I thought a graphical interface could work really well with the alchemical rituals, as you could implement all the alchemical formulae as progressively-unlocked buttons on a specialized interface that would also include all your ingredients (and which could in turn perhaps allow for customized notes and sorting as you identified their different properties). But I wasn’t sure how you’d implement the game’s major “shortcut” features like going to rooms you haven’t yet visited, or creating a new product when it doesn’t yet exist in the world. Upon reflection you could add a “go here” button to the map, and a “create this product/perform this ritual” button in the alchemical index, but I’m not sure it’d be quite as flexible as what the text parser enables you to do.

Still, it’d be cool for someone to try, since I could see the game piquing a lot of interest if it was made more accessible to a non-IF audience - there’ve been all these games lately about potion-making and herbology, and I’ve dipped into them but largely bounced off since the alchemical systems seem superficial and game-y compared to Hadean Lands.

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I think people would be open to a graphical alchemy puzzle game.

People primarily enjoy the Atelier games for the crafting systems, though those are also turn-based (mostly) JRPGs, which have their own pull. Console players might also appreciate a game that doesn’t have the… issues that the Atelier games have.

I always considered a challenge of mid-to-late HL to be information management. I think there are opportunities to make this easier in a delivery format that doesn’t form-feed line by line. Having a map with pins or item lists or even puzzles required for entering an area (solved vs unsolved) would all be ways to manage information in new and possibly beneficial ways.

I don’t think it could be as flexible, but I don’t think most players care about that as long as they don’t have to type.
I’m not even sure you’d need very many graphics to make it work-- just the rituals, perhaps. I think clicking/tapping on a verb list and words in the text would probably work well, and then maybe GO TO/CREATE buttons that you could scroll on to pick a location or perform a ritual.

There are a number of games in the App store that are tappable text games, and some of them work very well indeed. If anyone’s interested in a list of games like this for inspiration, they should DM me, because when I’m not playing IF on my computer, I’m playing IF on my iPad and looking for text games that are hybrids of parser and choice. I have an extensive list.

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I should say that I think Hadean Lands is not a great candidate for a graphical adaptation. The puzzles are not visual at all, aside from a couple of combination locks. The game information is multisensory – I spend a lot of time describing different smells, textures, feelings, and even emotional responses as you go through the rituals. In graphical form that would be, what? Different colored bubbles and steam and some sound effects? I think it would really flatten it out in a boring way.

there’ve been all these games lately about potion-making and herbology

Strange Horticulture was really good, I thought.

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