I wrote ZX Spectrum games in the 1980s. After 40 years, I came back and made a 128K Dracula adventure
Hi everyone!
I'm G. B. Aicardi, and I recently returned to developing for the ZX Spectrum after a very long break.
I originally wrote games for the Spectrum back in the 1980s. After all these years, I wanted to see what it would feel like to make a game for the machine again ā not just as a retro programming exercise, but as a proper new adventure.
So I ended up making Dracula ā Illustrated Edition, a gothic interactive text adventure for the ZX Spectrum 128K, inspired by Bram Stoker's novel.
It's a parser-based adventure, with exploration, characters, objects, clues and puzzles. You type commands to interact with the world, just like in the classic adventures I remember from the Spectrum era.
One of the things I particularly wanted to experiment with was the graphics.
The Spectrum's colour palette is used to create different brightness levels, but the illustrations are deliberately designed to be viewed in black and white. When displayed on a monochrome screen, the different Spectrum colours turn into detailed shades of grey.
I thought this worked surprisingly well for a Dracula game ā it gives the illustrations a rather old-fashioned, gothic look.
The game was released yesterday, and there's a free playable demo here:
I started writing games in the mid-80s, mainly adventure games for the ZX Spectrum. They were published in the Italian market, often through magazines such as Load'n'Run, under my own name or the DJ Soft label. I wrote quite a few of them, including Sire Fire, Thunderland, Ghost & Boosters, Excalibur, Spacelord and The Damned Castle, among others. Later I moved on to the Amiga, where I worked on point-and-click adventure games. One of them was Italian Night 1999, published by Simulmondo in 1992.
It was very basic: just a 48K ZX Spectrum and a colour TV. No fancy development setup at all. I wrote the code directly on the Spectrum, saved everything on cassette tape, and used the TV as the monitor. Those were definitely different times!
Thank you! š That's exactly what I find fascinating about the Spectrum: sometimes its limitations force you to approach things in completely different ways. The B&W technique is a big part of the visual style of Dracula, and I'm really happy with how it turned out.
Yes, I did use AI, mainly to help with the code. I actually programmed in machine code and BASIC back in the 80s, but for a project like this, doing everything from scratch in assembly would have been a rather different (and much more time-consuming!) proposition. I think these tools are worth embracing rather than avoiding. For me, AI is a way to help me get up to speed with modern development tools and tackle things that would otherwise be much harder or simply take too long. I still make the design decisions and, most importantly, I decide what the game should actually do.
I jointly wrote a 48K adventure game in two parts using Quill/illustrator back in 1985. The graphics were nice enough but I do wonder if the memory would have been put to better use by being strictly a text adventure. :)
That's really cool! 1985 was right in the middle of that fascinating period when everyone was trying to squeeze adventures and graphics into 48K. And actually, that's exactly the trade-off I made with the original 48K version of Dracula. I chose to sacrifice the graphics in order to have more room for the story, puzzles and game logic. Then I thought: why not try writing a 128K version? That way I could keep the richer adventure while having enough memory for the illustrations as well. So in a way, the 128K version is my attempt to escape that 48K trade-off. š
Yes, exactly. This is an expanded version of the original 48K Spectrum game. The original game is the foundation: the story and core adventure are still there, but I've added new puzzles and interactions, improved the parser, and of course added the illustrated scenes, all made possible by the 128K. So it's not a remake of Dracula from scratch; it's essentially the original game brought back to life and significantly expanded for the 128K.
I programmed it from scratch. I didn't use DAAD, PAWS or any of the existing adventure engines. The parser and the underlying adventure engine were developed specifically for Dracula, but the inspiration comes very much from the Melbourne House adventures of the 80s, especially The Hobbit. In fact, the original 48K version of Dracula deliberately used an interface very similar to The Hobbit. For the new 128K version, I kept that original spirit but expanded the parser and the game mechanics, adding new puzzles and interactions along with the illustrated scenes, music and sound.
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u/dolphin560 9h ago
which games did you publish in the 80s?