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Mystery House
Mystery House is an adventure game released by On-Line Systems on May 5, 1980. It was designed, written and illustrated by Roberta Williams, and programmed by Ken Williams for the Apple II. Mystery House is the first graphical adventure game and the first game produced by On-Line Systems, the company which would evolve into Sierra On-Line. It is one of the earliest horror video games.
The game starts near an abandoned Victorian mansion. The player is soon locked inside the house with no other option than to explore. The mansion contains many interesting rooms and seven other people: Tom, a plumber; Sam, a mechanic; Sally, a seamstress; Dr. Green, a surgeon; Joe, a grave-digger; Bill, a butcher; Daisy, a cook.
Initially, the player has to search the house in order to find a hidden cache of jewels. Soon, dead bodies (of the other people) begin appearing and it is obvious there is a murderer on the loose in the house. The player must discover who it is or become the next victim.
At the end of the 1970s, Ken Williams sought to set up a company for enterprise software for the market-dominating Apple II computer. One day, he took a teletype terminal to his house to work on the development of an accounting program. Looking through a catalog, he found a game called Colossal Cave Adventure. He bought the game and introduced it to his wife, Roberta, and they both played through it. They began to search for something similar but found the market underdeveloped. Roberta decided that she could write her own, and conceived of the plot for Mystery House, taking inspiration from Agatha Christie's novel And Then There Were None. She was also inspired by the board game Clue, which helped to break her out from a linear structure to the game.
Recognizing that though she knew some programming, she needed someone else to code the game, she convinced her husband to help her. Ken agreed and borrowed his brother's Apple II computer to write the game on. Ken suggested that adding graphical scenes to the otherwise text-based game would make it more interesting for players, and the couple bought a VersaWriter machine, on which users can trace over a line drawing and convert it to a digital drawing. Roberta drew seventy scenes for the game. Ken found, however, that the resulting digital drawings were too large to fit onto a 5¼-inch floppy disk, so he devised a way to convert the images into coordinates and instructions for the program to redraw the lines of the scenes rather than static images, as well as writing a better version of the VersaWriter scanning software. The resulting game is a text-based adventure with a depiction of the character's location displayed above the text. The game's code was completed in only a few days, and was finished on May 5, 1980. The couple took out an advertisement in Micro magazine as On-Line Systems, and mass-produced Ziploc bags containing a floppy disk and a sheet of instructions, to be sold at US$24.95 (equivalent to $97.49 in 2025).
To the Williamses' surprise, what Roberta had initially considered a hobby project sold more than 10,000 copies through mail-order. Including its 1982 rerelease through the SierraVenture line, 80,000 units were eventually sold worldwide, making it one of the best-selling computer games at the time.[citation needed]
Mark Marlow reviewed Mission: Asteroid, Mystery House, and The Wizard and the Princess for Computer Gaming World, and stated that "Mystery House is considerably more difficult and provides many traps for the unwary in a wonderfully Victorian setting".
Computer Gaming World in 1996 ranked it fourth on the magazine's list of the most innovative computer games. GamePro named Mystery House the 51st most important game of all time in 2007, for introducing a visual component to adventure games and for featuring graphics at a time when most computer games did not. Though the game is often considered the first adventure game to use graphics, dungeon crawl role-playing video games such as pedit5 (1975) had already been using graphics prior to its release. Applying graphics to an adventure game, however, was unprecedented as previous story-based adventure games were entirely text-based.
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Mystery House AI simulator
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Mystery House
Mystery House is an adventure game released by On-Line Systems on May 5, 1980. It was designed, written and illustrated by Roberta Williams, and programmed by Ken Williams for the Apple II. Mystery House is the first graphical adventure game and the first game produced by On-Line Systems, the company which would evolve into Sierra On-Line. It is one of the earliest horror video games.
The game starts near an abandoned Victorian mansion. The player is soon locked inside the house with no other option than to explore. The mansion contains many interesting rooms and seven other people: Tom, a plumber; Sam, a mechanic; Sally, a seamstress; Dr. Green, a surgeon; Joe, a grave-digger; Bill, a butcher; Daisy, a cook.
Initially, the player has to search the house in order to find a hidden cache of jewels. Soon, dead bodies (of the other people) begin appearing and it is obvious there is a murderer on the loose in the house. The player must discover who it is or become the next victim.
At the end of the 1970s, Ken Williams sought to set up a company for enterprise software for the market-dominating Apple II computer. One day, he took a teletype terminal to his house to work on the development of an accounting program. Looking through a catalog, he found a game called Colossal Cave Adventure. He bought the game and introduced it to his wife, Roberta, and they both played through it. They began to search for something similar but found the market underdeveloped. Roberta decided that she could write her own, and conceived of the plot for Mystery House, taking inspiration from Agatha Christie's novel And Then There Were None. She was also inspired by the board game Clue, which helped to break her out from a linear structure to the game.
Recognizing that though she knew some programming, she needed someone else to code the game, she convinced her husband to help her. Ken agreed and borrowed his brother's Apple II computer to write the game on. Ken suggested that adding graphical scenes to the otherwise text-based game would make it more interesting for players, and the couple bought a VersaWriter machine, on which users can trace over a line drawing and convert it to a digital drawing. Roberta drew seventy scenes for the game. Ken found, however, that the resulting digital drawings were too large to fit onto a 5¼-inch floppy disk, so he devised a way to convert the images into coordinates and instructions for the program to redraw the lines of the scenes rather than static images, as well as writing a better version of the VersaWriter scanning software. The resulting game is a text-based adventure with a depiction of the character's location displayed above the text. The game's code was completed in only a few days, and was finished on May 5, 1980. The couple took out an advertisement in Micro magazine as On-Line Systems, and mass-produced Ziploc bags containing a floppy disk and a sheet of instructions, to be sold at US$24.95 (equivalent to $97.49 in 2025).
To the Williamses' surprise, what Roberta had initially considered a hobby project sold more than 10,000 copies through mail-order. Including its 1982 rerelease through the SierraVenture line, 80,000 units were eventually sold worldwide, making it one of the best-selling computer games at the time.[citation needed]
Mark Marlow reviewed Mission: Asteroid, Mystery House, and The Wizard and the Princess for Computer Gaming World, and stated that "Mystery House is considerably more difficult and provides many traps for the unwary in a wonderfully Victorian setting".
Computer Gaming World in 1996 ranked it fourth on the magazine's list of the most innovative computer games. GamePro named Mystery House the 51st most important game of all time in 2007, for introducing a visual component to adventure games and for featuring graphics at a time when most computer games did not. Though the game is often considered the first adventure game to use graphics, dungeon crawl role-playing video games such as pedit5 (1975) had already been using graphics prior to its release. Applying graphics to an adventure game, however, was unprecedented as previous story-based adventure games were entirely text-based.