Demon's Tomb - The Awakening
Demon's Tomb, published in 1989 for the PC, Tandy, Atari ST and Commodore Amiga was a traditional text adventure with a parser that surpassed the Infocom and Level 9 ones and, I like to think, with an original twist on the genre.
The game was developed in a custom-written authoring language that compiled to a machine independent pseudo code that in turn ran under a custom-written virtual machine. The authoring tools were PC-based and only the virtual machine had to be developed in order to port the game to new platforms. This had obvious advantages in terms of not having to significantly recode or retest for each new platform. Most of the programming was in C with speed critical parts, such as graphics rendering and text decompression, being written in the assembly language of the target machine. Space was a major consideration and completely dominated the architecture, with the entire game having to fit in the 128K of the Tandy and a distribution constraint of 720K disk space for graphics.
The project took 18 months and I loved every moment of it (well, apart from when the producer messed around with the opening text by introducing yuk like, "the one man with whom we are concerned here" to clarify the plot for the North American audience). Graphically the game suffered from having to share the same 8 colour PC/Tandy graphics across all target machines due to budgetary constraints. So, I was amazed when Computer and Video Games magazine awarded it a Golden Scroll rating despite the graphics (see scanned review 119K).
