Transylvania

Transylvania
Title	Transylvania
Release date(s)	1982
Original Platform(s)	Apple II
Original Publisher(s)	Penguin Software
Developer(s)	Antonio Antiochia Mark Pelczarski David Albert
Category(s)	Entertainment Adventure Text

History

Transylvania was an early graphic adventure written by Antonio Antiochia and published by Penguin Software for the [II] in 1982. Combining the command-driven play of a traditional text adventure with colorful high-resolution illustrations, Transylvania became one of Penguin Software's most important early games and helped establish the company as a publisher of graphic adventures as well as graphics utilities.

The origins of Transylvania predated Penguin Software itself. Around 1981, while Mark Pelczarski was operating Micro Co-op, the mail-order software business that would evolve into Penguin Software, he spoke with a customer who mentioned that his teenage son had written an adventure game for the Apple II. The young programmer was Antonio Antiochia of Ann Arbor, Michigan. Pelczarski encouraged the family to send him a copy of the program.

Antiochia's game was originally an entirely text-based adventure. Pelczarski was impressed by it, but graphics had become central to his own software work, and the company he was building would soon promote itself as "the graphics people." Pelczarski therefore suggested that Antiochia illustrate the adventure. To make this possible, he supplied him with Penguin's graphics software, including developmental versions of routines that would become part of The Graphics Magician.

This substantially changed the project. Antiochia had not originally designed Transylvania as a graphic adventure and had little experience creating computer artwork. Nevertheless, he began illustrating the game's locations himself. According to Pelczarski's later recollection, Antiochia produced "truly wonderful graphics for the time." The process was laborious; later accounts indicate that he spent roughly nine months creating the illustrations, considerably longer than he had spent writing the original text adventure.

The technology behind the pictures was important. Rather than storing every scene as a complete Apple II high-resolution screen image, Penguin's graphics system could store instructions describing how a picture was to be drawn. When the player entered a location, the computer reconstructed the illustration from those commands. This allowed relatively elaborate scenes to occupy much less disk space than a collection of full-screen bitmap images would have required. The technique made it practical to include numerous illustrated locations within an adventure running on the limited memory and storage available to an early Apple II.

Penguin Software also worked on Antiochia's original program before publication. Pelczarski later recalled that the company reprogrammed portions of the game using assembly language, integrating Antiochia's adventure with Penguin's graphics technology. The completed program was released for the Apple II in 1982 as a "high-resolution graphic adventure." The original version required a 48K Apple II.

The Adventure

Transylvania casts the player as an unnamed adventurer summoned to rescue Princess Sabrina, daughter of the King of Transylvania. Sabrina has disappeared somewhere in a strange countryside threatened by a murderous vampire. Shortly after beginning the search at midnight, the player discovers an ominous warning: "SABRINA DIES AT DAWN!" The message establishes one of the game's distinguishing features— a time limit within which the adventure must be completed.

The player explores forests, roads, buildings and other locations by entering commands into a text parser. The original packaging described the system in terms of simple verb-and-noun instructions such as "GO NORTH," "LOOK TREE" and "TAKE BRICK." Above the textual portion of the display, many locations are represented by Antiochia's high-resolution illustrations.

Although its premise draws heavily upon Gothic horror, Transylvania has an unusually eclectic world. The player may encounter a vampire, a werewolf, a witch and a troublesome goblin, but the game also incorporates deliberately unexpected elements, including an alien spacecraft. The mixture of horror, fantasy, humor and science fiction gives the game a character somewhat different from the more internally consistent fantasy worlds of many contemporary adventures.

The adventure is relatively open, allowing the player to explore much of its landscape early in the game. Objects discovered throughout the countryside must be collected and used to overcome obstacles, survive encounters and ultimately locate and rescue Sabrina. Some dangers are persistent rather than confined to individual puzzles. A werewolf, for example, can appear while the player travels through the countryside and remains a threat until the means of dealing with it are discovered.

The result retained much of the structure of the text adventures that inspired Antiochia while using graphics to give each location a visual identity. At a time when illustrated adventures were still a relatively new form, the pictures were a major part of the game's appeal.

Penguin Software

Transylvania arrived at an important moment for Penguin Software. Pelczarski and his collaborators were developing tools intended to make sophisticated Apple II graphics easier for programmers to create and store. The Graphics Magician, developed by Pelczarski, David Lubar and Chris Jochumson, became one of the company's best-known products.

Transylvania demonstrated that the same technology could be used for commercial entertainment software. Instead of merely selling tools with which other programmers could create games, Penguin could publish games built around those tools. The success of Transylvania consequently helped expand Penguin Software's business beyond graphics utilities.

Pelczarski later described Transylvania as one of the best graphic adventures of its period. The game also achieved significant commercial success for the young company. Its reception encouraged Penguin to continue publishing adventure games and other independently created software. Transylvania was listed among the notable Apple II adventures of 1982 alongside such titles as Deadline, Zork II, Zork III, Time Zone, The Mask of the Sun and Ulysses and the Golden Fleece.

The relationship between Transylvania and Penguin's graphics software also anticipated the company's later publishing model. Programmers increasingly submitted games that had been created with The Graphics Magician, while other software publishers licensed its graphics routines. Penguin generally allowed the routines to be incorporated into commercial products without a conventional licensing fee, requiring instead an acknowledgment of the graphics system— a practice that helped advertise Penguin's development tools.

Versions and Ports

The original 1982 Apple II edition was only the beginning of Transylvania.

The game was subsequently adapted for other popular home computers, including the Atari 8-bit family and Commodore 64. According to later credits, Kirk Hullson and Jon Niedfeldt were responsible for the Atari and Commodore adaptations.

A particularly significant version appeared for the newly introduced Apple Macintosh in 1984. Robert Hardy adapted the program for the Macintosh, with Macintosh graphics credited to Holly Thomason. Penguin Software founder Mark Pelczarski has described Transylvania as the first independently produced game commercially released for the Macintosh, distinguishing it from software supplied by Apple with the computer. Its appearance so early in the Macintosh's life gave the game an unusual place in the software history of both the Apple II and Macintosh.

By the middle of the decade Penguin had developed a more sophisticated adventure-development system called Comprehend. Created principally by Pelczarski and Jeffrey Jay, Comprehend was designed to separate an adventure's content from the machine-specific interpreter used to run it. This allowed Penguin to bring the same adventure to several different computer platforms while providing a more capable natural-language parser.

Transylvania was subsequently rewritten and expanded as a Comprehend Interactive Novel. The new edition contained revised graphics, additional locations and additional puzzles and was released for machines including the Apple II, IBM PC, Atari ST and Amiga. On the Apple II, a later double-high-resolution edition took advantage of enhanced graphics capabilities to provide 16-color scenes.

The multiple revisions can sometimes make surviving copies of Transylvania appear to represent substantially different games. The 1982 release is the original Apple II graphic adventure created from Antiochia's earlier text game; the later Comprehend edition represents an expanded reimplementation using Penguin's newer adventure system.

Sequels

Transylvania eventually became the first installment of a series.

Antiochia returned to its setting for The Crimson Crown, released in 1985. The sequel continued the story with Princess Sabrina and Prince Erik and was written specifically for Penguin's Comprehend system.

A third game, Transylvania III: Vanquish the Night, followed later in the decade. Credited to Antonio Antiochia and Veronika Slintak, it continued the mythology established by the earlier adventures.

By this period Penguin Software had become Polarware, and the Transylvania games became closely associated with the company's Comprehend line of interactive novels.

Legacy

Transylvania occupies an interesting position in the development of the early graphic adventure. It did not invent the form—illustrated adventures had already appeared on the Apple II— but it demonstrated how specialized graphics technology could make a large collection of illustrated scenes practical on machines with extremely limited storage and memory.

It was also an unusually personal production. The central concept, programming and original artwork were largely the work of a teenage programmer who had initially intended the game to be a conventional text adventure. Penguin Software recognized its potential and supplied technology that changed both its presentation and its commercial prospects.

For Penguin, the game became more than another software title. It provided a showcase for the company's graphics technology, helped establish Penguin as a game publisher, and became the foundation for a line of illustrated adventures that eventually led to the development of the Comprehend system.

For Antiochia, Transylvania began a fictional world that he would revisit through two sequels and numerous revisions over the remainder of the decade. For players encountering it in 1982, however, its appeal was considerably simpler: a mysterious landscape appeared piece by piece on the Apple II screen, a princess had only until dawn to live, and somewhere in the darkness of Transylvania the player had to discover how to save her.

Releases

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