Oh, that one! I started watching it on BBC iPlayer, but it was removed the day after a watched half of it, so I never finished it. It had a pretty cool idea, I have to admit.
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There’s an IF game which has some similarities to the movie: “Vicious Cycles” by Simon Mark. The first version was published long before the movie, and I sometimes wondered whether the screenwriter drew inspiration from the game.
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A bunch of irl friends discovered Dracula Daily (an adaptation of Dracula that takes advantage of the epistolary format and sends you each letter on the day it was written) this year, so I’m reading through it again with them, and currently our dear friend Jonathan Harker is giving off IF adventurer vibes.
I went back to the room, and taking a lamp, tried all the doors. They were all locked, as I had expected, and the locks were comparatively new; but I went down the stone stairs to the hall where I had entered originally. I found I could pull back the bolts easily enough and unhook the great chains; but the door was locked, and the key was gone!
That key must be in the Count’s room; I must watch should his door be unlocked, so that I may get it and escape. I went on to make a thorough examination of the various stairs and passages, and to try the doors that opened from them. One or two small rooms near the hall were open, but there was nothing to see in them except old furniture, dusty with age and moth-eaten.
At last, however, I found one door at the top of the stairway which, though it seemed to be locked, gave a little under pressure. I tried it harder, and found that it was not really locked, but that the resistance came from the fact that the hinges had fallen somewhat, and the heavy door rested on the floor. Here was an opportunity which I might not have again, so I exerted myself, and with many efforts forced it back so that I could enter.
I was now in a wing of the castle further to the right than the rooms I knew and a storey lower down. From the windows I could see that the suite of rooms lay along to the south of the castle, the windows of the end room looking out both west and south. On the latter side, as well as to the former, there was a great precipice. The castle was built on the corner of a great rock, so that on three sides it was quite impregnable, and great windows were placed here where sling, or bow, or culverin could not reach, and consequently light and comfort, impossible to a position which had to be guarded, were secured.
He then proceeds to examine the furniture, the windows, the moonlight, the dust, and so on in his search for a means of escape.
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Some great IF archaeology! I never knew that a Robin Hood game existed (though it stands to reason) and the idea that Source Code might be based on an undiscovered indie gem is fascinating.
I also really enjoyed that movie too… in fact, though I’ve heard it said that a player shouldn’t have to fail / die to succeed in IF, where the premise is directly pitched in this way, I think that it makes explicit what is already implicit… that once we’re stuck, we’re probably going to save the position, try any number of stunts and generally rattle the game’s cage whether we end up dead or not. That Groundhog Daydom is part of the appeal for me.
Back on the 80s nostalgia trail, a couple of shows that I felt have promise are Manimal and Quantum Leap. Manimal for the transformations obviously - I think there was an episode where he turns himself into a python to save someone from sinking sand in the desert! Are there games already out there with multiple metamorphoses? Then Quantum Leap because of the hub with Ziggy to multiple worlds / experiences which could break up into mini-quests in a longer story arc.
Only wish my coding were up to creating them!
PS I think Ryan Veeder was working on a Dracula Files adaptation but he may have put it on hold as it was a BIG project.
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If you’re going to do quantum leap, then Sliders should definitely be considered. I really enjoyed the first 2 seasons of that show and it would adapt to IF well.
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One worth mentioning is the Thieves’ World series first edited by Robert Lynn Asprin. The early books were anthologies of short stories by various SF&F authors. They were all set in the same universe, and centered on the city of Sanctuary.
It was fascinating to see how different writers approached storytelling in a shared universe. I recall one writer being ticked-off when another writer killed off a fan-favorite character.
I think this could work well with IF: A shared world with a basic map and outline, and various writers filling out the framework with their own games. It could even be assembled as a jam. (Now that I write that, I bet there was a jam like this at some point.)
(Disclaimer: I’m not the first to suggest this. Other mentions include this thread from 2012 and this post from last year.)
Addendum: I’m aware of games such as Cragne Manor and Pick Up the Phone Booth and Aisle and like. I’m speaking of a broader, looser collaboration, with many games tied together by location and common history.
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I’ve wanted to do this for a while, but it’s a lot of book and I’m intimidated by the scope of the project.
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True; it would probably be best adapted as just a small part, Jonathan realizing he’s trapped in Castle Dracula and trying to escape.
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The closet multi-author thing that actually came to fruition is probably the Andomeda series.
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YES, IT IS TRUE, I have been working on a Dracula adaptation called Ryan Veeder’s Bram Stoker’s The Dracula Files, and my Patreon supporters have seen a few pieces of it. Jonathan’s diary is bizarrely obsessed with the layout of rooms (I swear certain passages would compile in Inform 7) so those parts were easy to adapt. Other parts were harder to design, because a lot of the book deals with people noticing scary things happening and not so much trying to accomplish stuff. So in some places I’ve had to invent obstacles and motivations (and situations???) that aren’t in the book.
This might be a spurious line of reasoning, but many Alfred Hitchcock movies have sequences that hinge on small objects (like a statuette, or a bracelet, or a bomb). The way typical text adventure presentation can draw attention to that sort of object could maybe be leveraged in an adaptation. A lot of Hitchcock movies also take place in small, isolated settings…
Some good candidates:
- The Lady Vanishes
- Rear Window
- North by Northwest
- Psycho
- what I remember of Foreign Correspondent
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Maybe the following two movies would make good IF:
“Labyrinth” (with David Bowie as the elven king) where a girl has to find her way through a maze to rescue her little brother.
“The Prince’s Bride” where you find nearly everything you know from tabletop RPGs.
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I remember playing it on the Apple and not getting very far.
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I don’t know that game. But it’s just a coincidence of names I think. Because the stories differ strongly.
See yourself:
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Ah, ok. I’m corrected. But my point is for the OP to have the plot as inspiration for an IF. And the plots differ (at least if the reviews on Moby Games and IMDB are correct.) But if there are indeed similar plot elements then copyright law makes an IF adaption at least difficult.
I also wasn’t aware that Jim Henson was involved in this movie. But now that I read it, it fits.
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Both game and movie were produced by Lucasfilm, if memory serves me correctly. The former was a tie-in to the latter and both were released in 1986.
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I think I have a winner here!
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir.
Andy Weir wrote The Martian, and Matt Damon “scienced the fuck out of those potatoes”!
His hobby is calculating orbital trajectories. I think we have someone on the forum who jazzes with this. I’ll tag that person later on…
The first 70 pages of Project Hail Mary read like a text-adventure transcript with a bit of padding.
-amnesia? check.
-strange surroundings? check.
-locked bulkheads? check.
-gradually unfolding backstory through awkwardly inserted flashbacks? check.
Actually, Weir appears to be asking for a text-adventure re-write when he explicitly mentions “twisty little passages, all alike” around page 50.
The form of this text would be a worthy candidate for a standard “solve puzzle-get key-enter next room-repeat” adventure. But the scientific details , which are the strong point of Weir’s writing, invite an IF-author with that same set of sensitivities…
Someone perhaps who enjoys calculating the speed of sound in Jovian or Saturnian atmospheres…
@inventor200 , You must read this book. Must. I’ve been thinking about you each time I managed to extract my focus slightly from the text.
“Joey would love this!”
Every time I looked up to the skies pondering a scientific detail.
Please @inventor200 , read this book. You will be Capitalising Your Thoughts all the way.
Everyone else, if you’d like a great SF escape room with a weird twist, have a go at this.
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It means a lot that someone can accurately guess what I would like! 
Absolutely love this book! Also, I agree that it would make for a good IF story! That’s something I’ve pondered quite a bit, too!
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Or calculating the apparent gravitational force by dropping a pen off a table 400 times while squinting at the seconds-hand of a watch.
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Ah. An Aspie (someone with Asperger’s Syndrome). Takes one to know one – I’m an Aspie, too.
Now, how do we combine calculating orbital trajectories with Parliamentary Procedure (which is my own esoteric Aspie interest)…??? 
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