I have this memory of an old text game that was packaged with an illustrated book. It was sort of like a dungeon crawler, but it would use the book for most of its flavor text and all of its illustrations other than the title screen of the game.
You would do something in the game, and the game would update your character’s stats and whatnot, lets say you entered a new room, but it’d give you a page number to turn to in the book that matched up with what you were experiencing in the game. It was like a bizarre amalgamation of an early cRPG and a proto-CYOA book.
The book was nonsensical and unusable without the game; it wasn’t a standalone CYOA book. Whereas the game was very dry and and text minimum without the book. The game was nearly unplayable without the book as key details needed to progress the game were included in the book text.
Basically, the game escaped its size limitations by offloading all of the static text and images to physical ink and paper.
The problem is I don’t remember the title, or even much about it. I can’t find it online.
Does anyone know of a game designed like this? Because it’s starting to bug me that it seems to only live in my memory.
Was it on C64? Narrowing down the platform might help.
I don’t think there was a particular name for this time of hybrid adventure. “Bookware” tended to be used for games that were sold with books, though, but they didn’t tend to be integrated as these examples are; with the need to use the illustrations in the manual in these cases.
I’m sorry I can’t be more useful with the platform. My first operating system was DOS, which led into being able to boot to early windows from DOS, etc. I was exposed to other systems, but never to the point where I grew familiar.
temple of apshai had descriptive text in a surprisingly large (for its time) manual. there were room descriptions and sometimes atmospheric messages, too.
It had a PET release, which might fit your hardware description. There was definitely a tape version.
I played the c64 version a lot.
there were a lot of games that had supplementary text. I recall Pool of Radiance as a later example.
Also, looking up the PET, that looks alot like my uncle’s computer waaaaayyyy back when, before placental mammals walked the Earth.
Early tape versions of the game had no means to save progress. The player was prompted to write down all statistics when quitting the game and had to type them in when resuming play. Later floppy versions fixed this by saving the status on the disk.
Not the game you’re thinking of, but Dragon Wars is another game with much of the content in a book of paragraphs, if anybody is a fan of that kind of thing generally. No illustrations, sadly.
… I dunno… maybe? I was maybe 5 or 6 at the time. I thought it looked like the PET I looked up, but it could have been that too. You’re talking 30 years ago.
