What Simon the Sorcerer says about game design at point and click's creative peak

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Simon the Sorcerer
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Duration: 20:18
9,273 views
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I'm delving into my collection of adventure games, and in doing so find that Simon the Sorcerer tells us an awful lot about the genre in its heyday, and why that heyday was going to be a lot shorter than we expected in 1993. Or 1994 if we wanted Chris Barrie voicing the explanation of it.

How did I find the adventures of He Who Sorcers? And why did vintage magazines claim this was possibly better than Day of the Tentacle? And am I going to get every last one of the Internet People correcting my pronunciation of "Elvira"?

Frustrating puzzles:

0:00 A little bit adventurous
1:02 It was twenty years ago today
2:34 The gap narrows
4:11 A British game about a wizard
5:18 Day of the US-centric Comedy Reference
6:32 Those Monkey Island comparisons
7:45 Ron Gilbert's conclusion
9:15 Combinatorial logic
10:50 Handmade with love and MT-32s
12:30 It wouldn't be Timberwolf without the blackboard
13:35 Cardinal sins of adventure gaming
15:57 Too much forest
17:35 An infringement of copyright
18:26 Shopping, 1997 style
19:34 The inevitable conclusion

Media credits:

Chris Barrie by ...some guy, CC-BY 2.0
Sci-fi & Fantasy Weekender 2017 by big-ashb, CC-BY 2.0
Stock footage from Pexels
Some public domain imagery from Wikimedia Commons
Some CC-0 sounds from Freesound

PC Zone and Computer Gaming World scans provided by the Retro eXo project.

CC-BY 2.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

Yes, they could probably also show more colours with copper tricks. If it happened, you can tell me.

Bonus fact: Simon was apparently dreamt up by Simon on a long car journey, with a section along the M5 being a key moment of the character's creation. And we just played I Spy.

#pointandclick #adventuregame




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Tags:
retrogaming
dos
adventure soft
point'n'click
point and click
taking a very long time to start playing the game the video is ostensibly about
obvious bait for people to claim every one of these puzzles was trivial
don't worry I spelt it sorceror about 50 times too



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TimberwolfK presently has 9,273 views for Simon the Sorcerer across 1 video, with his channel publishing less than an hour of Simon the Sorcerer content. This is less than 0.62% of the total video content that TimberwolfK has uploaded to YouTube.