Wow. This one takes me back.
The first real text adventure I ever played was Raka-Tu, on the TRS-80, and it hooked me hard. I played the Zorks, the original Adventure, but nothing grabbed me like Sorcerer. This was way back in the early ‘80s, in high school, when I’d spend my lunch times in the computer lab playing these games.
True, like most text adventures, it often times degenerated into a guessing game, as you flailed about in your memory, trying to find the word that the parser would accept as a command and let you do what you’d been trying to do all along.
Still, something about Sorcerer – maybe it was the secret magic spell words, maybe it was just a real change from the pure item puzzles of previous games – something gave the game the feel of having a much wider variety of options.
Yeah, in retrospect, the spells you learned did function pretty much like the items in an item puzzle, but they gave the feel of being something different. And they let you feel like the character you were playing was actually doing things. Accomplishing things, rather than just hauling around a bag of stuff and trying to fit each thing into every keyhole he came across.
The challenge of learning the different spells, of finding the different spells, and figuring
out the right place to cast them made the game feel much more like a thinking challenge, as opposed to a guessing game. Really, it was no more sophisticated than the other text adventures, but the presentation was, in my mind, far superior. Maybe it’s just that I liked the idea of playing a sorcerer, rather than a random wanderer who seems bent on starting his own rummage sale.
But presentation is the point, isn’t it? I mean, when we’re talking about a text-based adventure, you can’t impress people with flashy graphics. All you can do is build a strong story, and use good writing to sell it to the player. That’s where this game really shines in my memory. To tell the truth, I can’t remember much about the plot, except that you start in a school for wizards and go from there. But I do remember that the story captured the mind of my fourteen-year-old self. I spent weeks in the computer labs, every lunch hour, learning magic and trying to follow the story to its conclusion.
And that should tell you about the power of this game.
