The good old days

The games released on the Amstrad CPC in the 80s and 90s are probably the most important cultural influence on me; not music, not novels or comics, not cinema or Club Dorothée, no: good old-fashioned adventure, role-playing or action games on the CPC 6128 and CPC 464 (with external floppy disk drive).

Those were the good old days, the real ones: whole afternoons alone in front of Laser Squad, B.A.T or Sapiens. Or playing Iron Lord, almost to the end. That was Boxing Manager. Friday the 13th, with its childish graphics that I still revere and will always prefer to any current game, and whose soundtrack introduced me to Bach.

Countless nights of bluffing, playing Tension, with its incredible music, fifteen years later. And in between, as a nostalgic teenager, Cauldron games.

More than a cultural influence, the CPC implanted a visual and sonic aesthetic in me forever.

I've already written about it on this blog:

"I can't say enough how much I owe to the Amstrad CPC's software library, in the formation of my childhood imagination - to tell the truth, for my generation, video games held the role that fairy tales, or later novels and comic strips had to hold for others, in proportions probably impossible to measure but real."

Although I started out like everyone else with Boulder Dash and Gauntlet 2, I soon fell – and I wouldn't have done so if I'd sacrificed myself to console culture like some of my little friends – into adventure games, whether text-based or with a graphical interface: Le Manoir de Mortevielle, La Secte Noire, SRAM 2, Omeyad, L'Île...

These static, silent or almost silent, pitiless and laconic games had an aura, a mystery, a fascination that made me dream of them at night: a divine inspiration would make me type THE awaited command, and I'd discover rooms, characters, unlock events.

As a kid, I'd tried my hand at Basic 1.1, and I'd even started my own little text game, coded with my feet, but where you could navigate between several rooms in a deserted, dark house – I already had an imagination marked by life and warmth. It also seems to me that there was an alley, a mask lying on the ground...

I don't intend to go any further for the time being – it's a question of time and energy, as always. But one day, I'm bound to release a little game, even an extremely humble one, in Basic, for the CPC – for emulators, in any case, even if these days some old or new hardcore fans are releasing new games for this machine, in floppy disk format, with a case, etc. But for the kid in me, I'm not going to go any further. But for the kid I once was, unable to understand this language and its logic, and therefore unable to give life to his daydreams, even a simple .DSK file lost on some server will be one hell of a revenge – you get the revenge you can.

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This summer, a newcomer to the iFiction forum, Corax, published a demo of his first Inform 7 game, entitled La Boussole des Brumes. A parallel world where a simple schoolboy enters, with shadow cats, goblins, a merchant in a cart, and young boys and dead girls. It's very well written, very sober and yet very telling, and truly poetic. The battles are the best-written, most vivid I've ever read in a game.

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This demo gave me back the desire to work, just as I was starting to feel seriously sluggish. And on a classic, parser-based I.F., whereas my other current projects are all hyperlinked. These are big projects, which I can't hope to complete for a long time, and La Boussole des Brumes convinced me to work on something more humble, more laconic, and devoid of pretension, but which I would enjoy creating – whether the player would enjoy playing it is always another question.

I've always wanted to write an I.F. set in the ski resort in the Vosges mountains of Alsace, which I've known since birth and where my parents used to take us to ski and stay in a big chalet, bordered by forests, horse-riding grounds, toboggan runs and ski slopes? It's a setting that has always haunted me, and in which I've mentally played out many of the novels I've subsequently read, and even more scenarios, daydreams and personal fantasies... Stephen King has his good town of Castle Rock, I'm that place – and when it comes down to it, there's not much difference between rural America as it's portrayed in films and novels – romantic, rustic, mysterious – and these parts of France.

So I started using Inform 7 to model real places in the form of rooms and objects, as they are or as I remember them. My childhood chalet and the few others lining the resort's main road, the abandoned self-service restaurant, the slopes, the chapel... A wonderful playground entirely devoted to exploration, examination of finds, and a healthy dose of horror, since my Kingian influence isn't limited to the scenery alone.

Since L'Observatoire (the web version of which was entirely done by my friend Éric), I've finally taken up – a little – CSS and work on the visual aspect of an I.F. I'm not necessarily in favor of one illustration per game room or per NPC to be met. It's a lot of work, and as far as I'm concerned, I often have such a precise and ineffable idea of both places and characters, that no illustration can satisfy me. But above all, the point of an F.I. is to leave most of the work to the player's imagination. With this in mind, a limited number of images, such as a "cover" and a background image for the web page, can be more than enough to give the player an idea, a coloring, the beginnings of the game's visual identity – his or her imagination will do the rest, embroidering from that.

(Having said that, the same Eric taught me how to use the Python script that finally allows illustrations to be displayed with Quixe – thanks be to him).