Games
| Game | Year | Authors' names (Phoenix login names in parentheses) |
|---|---|---|
| Acheton | 1978 | Jon Thackray (JGT1), David Seal (DJS6), and Jonathan R. Partington (JRP1) |
| Murdac | 1982 | Jon Thackray and Jonathan R. Partington |
| Avon | 1982 | Jon Thackray and Jonathan R. Partington |
| Brand X | 1979 | Jonathan Mestel (AJM8) and Peter Killworth (PDK1) |
| Hamil | 1980 | Jonathan R. Partington |
| Quondam | 1980 | Rod Underwood (RU10) |
| Hezarin | 1980 | Steve Tinney, Alex Ship, and Jon Thackray |
| Xeno | unknown | Jonathan Mestel |
| Fyleet | 1985 | Jonathan R. Partington |
| Crobe | 1986 | Jonathan R. Partington |
| Sangraal | 1987 | Jonathan R. Partington |
| Nidus | 1987 | Adam Atkinson (AJFA1) |
| Parc | unknown | (JR26) |
| Xerb | unknown | Andrew Lipson (ASL1) |
| Spycatcher | circa 1988 | Jonathan R. Partington |
One recreational activity on Phoenix was the playing of interactive fiction games. Because the games were large and demanded significant machine resources whilst running, they were generally played outside of prime time, when research palled. (The exit message of one game, Fyleet written by Jonathan Partington in 1985, was "Well go and do some work then".) Other games were Advent (a.k.a. Colossal Cave), Zork (a.k.a. Dungeon), and Acheton.
Acheton was created by two Cambridge graduate students, Jon Thackray and David Seal, in 1978–1979, and expanded over the ensuring two years with the aid of Jonathan Partington. It was written with the aid of a game assembler, which, unlike the contemporary ZIL game assembler from Infocom, was freely available for use by all users of Phoenix between 1980 and 1995.
Several large early British games developed on Phoenix were sold commercially for microcomputers by Acornsoft and, later, Topologika. This was comparable to Infocom's contemporaneous commercialisation of the MIT mainframe game Zork. Many of these games were subsequently translated by Graham Nelson to run on the Z-Machine.
The commercial release of Brand X was Philosopher's Quest.
Read more about this topic: Phoenix (computer)
Famous quotes containing the word games:
“Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Intelligence and war are games, perhaps the only meaningful games left. If any player becomes too proficient, the game is threatened with termination.”
—William Burroughs (b. 1914)