Graphic Adventure Creator

“The Quill is dead. Long live GAC!” wrote one of CRASH’s reviewers in September 1986. The Quill carried on, but the Graphic Adventure Creator was its first serious rival. Where users of Gilsoft’s Quill bought a drawing program and a patch separately, Incentive Software’s package put a picture editor, a parser that read whole sentences and a text compressor into one program. Sinclair User called it “the equivalent of Gilsoft’s Quill, Patch and Illustrator combined”. It also started on the Amstrad CPC, not the Spectrum.

Fast facts

• Publisher: Incentive Software, Reading.
• Authors: Sean Ellis, who wrote the original on the Amstrad, and Brendan Kelly, who wrote the Spectrum version.
• Released: Amstrad CPC in 1985; ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64 and BBC Micro in 1986.
• Price: £22.95 on cassette, £27.95 on disc.
• Awards: CRASH Smash and ZZAP!64 Gold Medal, both September 1986.
• Successor: STAC, the ST Adventure Creator for the Atari ST, by Sean Ellis (1988).

Amstrad first

CRASH explained in July 1986 that Sean Ellis was “the main man behind the code, which was written on an Amstrad”. AMTIX reviewed the Amstrad version in December 1985, and its reviewer, Sean Masterson, called it “the most astounding program I’ve ever encountered on an eight bit machine”. By March 1986 it was at number 4 in Amstrad Action‘s readers’ chart of serious software, four places above The Quill.

The other versions followed in 1986. ZZAP!64 reported that the Commodore 64 version would be available on 1 May. The Spectrum version, which CRASH credited to Brendan Kelly, was in the shops by the summer, and Incentive was advertising a BBC Micro version in Acorn User by June. ZX Computing described the program as “designed and written by Sean Ellis and Brendan Kelly for Incentive Software”.

What it did

GAC was an “adventure processor”, as CRASH put it, rather than a programming language. From a main menu you typed in room descriptions and the exits from each room, the words the game should understand, the objects, the messages and the conditions that made things happen. Everything could be edited at any time, and the finished adventure ran on its own, without GAC in memory.

The parser

The parser was the part the reviewers praised most. Where The Quill read a verb and a noun, GAC’s games read whole sentences and several commands at once, joined with AND, THEN or commas. Its vocabulary came in three lists of up to 255 words each: nouns, verbs and adverbs, where “adverbs” also covered prepositions. CRASH’s reviewer called the interpreter “the real gem in GAC” and gave an example it could handle: GET THE LAMP THEN LIGHT IT. If the author made IT object number 255, it always meant the last noun mentioned. If something went wrong halfway through a long command, the rest of the command was ignored. Your Sinclair showed that DROP THE ELEPHANT CAREFULLY and CAREFULLY THE ELEPHANT DROP would both be understood.

Conditions

The game’s logic lived in three kinds of conditions, which Your Sinclair explained with a bull-ring. High priority conditions ran as soon as a location was described, before the player could type anything, so that arriving in the bull-ring with a red handkerchief could call up the death routine. Local conditions applied in one location after the player’s input, and low priority conditions handled routine commands such as GET and SCORE. A typical low priority condition read:

IF (VERB 8 AND NOUN 1 AND CARR 5) DROP 5

There were plenty of counters and markers (flags) to work with. CRASH liked that objects could be given weights, so a player could carry only so much, rather than a fixed number of things “regardless of how massive or miniscule they may be”. A “Quickstart” file loaded a ready-made set of common verbs and messages, and the tape came with a demonstration adventure, Ransom.

The pictures

The drawing program offered dots, lines, rectangles, ellipses, fill and shaded fill. It remembered every step, so an author could scan back through a picture and delete a single line or fill. Pictures could be merged, so a frame drawn once could decorate many locations; CRASH found that adding a previously drawn frame cost only three bytes. The Spectrum version showed an attribute grid to warn of colour clashes before you drew. Your Sinclair thought that “if the graphic editor wasn’t in the GAC it would still be a good drawing package”.

The pictures cost memory, and memory was tight. On the Spectrum GAC left about 23K for the adventure, although its text compression made that go further. Your Sinclair reported that Incentive’s own Ket Trilogy fitted into the system with several K to spare.

How it was received

The reviews were close to unanimous. Sinclair User’s reviewer thought that “Incentive has a winner here”, and the Spectrum Computing database records its score as 5 out of 5, with 9 out of 10 from Your Sinclair. ZX Computing called it “the most exciting utility I’ve encountered for some considerable time”. CRASH made it a Smash in September 1986, describing it as “the most powerful adventure creator on the Spectrum ever”, and ZZAP!64 gave it a Gold Medal the same month. CRASH’s one complaint was that the Spectrum version did not show its options on screen, as the Amstrad version did, so newcomers spent their first sessions with the manual. Its Fill command sometimes left gaps and had to be used twice.

The price put some people off. Sinclair User thought it “not exactly cheap at £22.95”, but CRASH argued that compared with the competition “both in terms of price and performance, it comes out way on top”. Gilsoft’s own answer, the Professional Adventure Writer, arrived in 1987 at the same £22.95.

Games written with it

Like Gilsoft, Incentive asked nothing from the games people made with its tool: CRASH reported that “they don’t want any loot, just an acknowledgement”. Incentive advertised for adventures written with GAC to publish itself, and in late 1986 launched a label for them, Medallion. Its first releases were Winter Wonderland and The Legend of Apache Gold, which Your Sinclair reported was written with GAC by Peter Torrance, the author of Subsunk and Seabase Delta. Linda Wright’s Black Fountain and Sharpe’s Deed, both written with GAC, “achieved some success for Incentive”, according to The Games Machine in 1988.

Amateurs used it for years afterwards. Amstrad Action was reviewing games written with GAC in 1990 and ran a competition for the best game written with it in 1992.

Afterwards

In 1988 Sean Ellis wrote STAC, the ST Adventure Creator, for the Atari ST. C&VG described it as “far more than just a conversion” of GAC, and Atari ST User introduced Ellis as a 21-year-old graduate in cybernetics and computer science from the University of Reading. He went on to work on Incentive’s Freescape games: ST Amiga Format credited him in 1989 with the 16-bit versions of Dark Side, and Retro Gamer later recorded that he converted Driller for the Atari ST and Amiga.

See also

• The Quill
• PAW
• Incentive Software
• Ian Andrew
• Gilsoft
• Graphic adventure
• Text adventure