Thursday, November 21, 2013

Wiki-Stub for the Game 'Valley of the Minotaur'

I see that someone has added a stub on Wikipedia for a game I helped co-create way back in the early 1980s -- 'Valley of the Minotaur'. LOL. My friend Nick Van Dyke was a budding programmer, he coded and designed it -- and I provided the map, content, descriptions, and many of the central characters and plot for the text-based game. To Nick's credit, he was a brilliant developer -- he had already created several games using a TSR-80 -- one was a turn based Star-Trek combat simulator which had a Romulan bird-of-prey that could cloak and de-cloak when it attacked!

Later, we collaborated on a second text based adventure project, 'Return to the Valley of the Minotaur', which was finished, but not published.

The writing and concepts were heavily influenced by popular text based exploration games of the day, including 'Microsoft's Adventure', 'Zork I' and 'II', as well as the maps from 'Wizardry'. There are many mythological influences, too -- I was reading Greek Mythology widely at the time. The minotaur 'boss' character came from a creative writing short-story, called 'Revenge of the Minotaur' I had submitted to one of my teachers in English. Other influences were Dungeons & Dragons, and some of the props from Dr. Who -- the Telephone booth in the game VoTM is a reflection of the Tardis.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valley_of_the_Minotaur

Nick and I had a great time making this game. I added to the article -- we'll see how it holds up. I might even have some of the hand written maps and descriptions in my files. I'll have to look and post them.

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Update 6.27.14

I have the game -- my dad saved it and my mom found it. Thanks dad, thanks mom. New post with artwork.

1 comment:

CM said...

I found the disks for VOM. Artwork from the original packaging and the game will be online soon.