Mystery House is a 1980 game for the Apple II by Roberta and Ken Williams. Although it had no sound, no color (other than black and white), and no animation, it did have one feature that would make it part of computer gaming history: graphics.

Mystery House was the first adventure game to ever contain graphics (70 simple two-dimensional drawings by Roberta Williams). Previously, adventure games were entirely text-based (this refers to story-based adventure games; computer role-playing games had been using graphics for several years by this point).

Story

The game starts near an abandoned Victorian mansion. The player is soon locked inside the house with no other option than to explore. The mansion contains many interesting rooms and seven other people. Terrible events start happening and dead bodies begin appearing. It becomes obvious that there is a murderer on the loose in the house, and the player must discover who it is or become the next victim.

Development History

At the end of the 1970s, Ken Williams sought to set up a company for enterprise software for the market-dominating Apple II computer. One day, he took a teletype terminal to his residence to work on the development of an accounting program. Rummaging through a catalogue, he found a program called Colossal Cave Adventure. He and his wife Roberta both played it all the way through and their encounter with this game would have a strong influence on video-gaming history.

Having finished Colossal Cave Adventure, they began to search for something similar, but found the market underdeveloped. Roberta Williams liked the concept of a textual adventure very much, but she thought that the player would have a more satisfying experience with images and began to think of her own game. She thus conceived Mystery House, the first graphical adventure game, a detective story inspired by Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None.

Ken spent a few nights developing the game on his Apple II, and in the end they made packets with ziploc bags containing the game's 5¼-inch disk and a photocopied paper describing the game. They sold it via a local software shop and to their great surprise, Mystery House was an enormous success. It quickly became a best-seller at a first-release price of States dollar|USD$" target="_blank" >^*24.95. Eventually, it sold more than 10,000 copies, which was a record-breaking phenomenon for the time. Though Ken believed that the gaming market would be less of a growth market than the professional software market, he persevered with games. Thus, in 1980, the Williams founded On-Line Systems which would become Sierra On-Line in 1982.

Trivia

• Elements from the game were reintroduced in The Colonel's Bequest.

External links

• The Dot Eaters entry profiling Mystery House and an early history of Sierra

Apple II games | 1980 computer and video games | Sierra games | Adventure games | Mystery House | Mystery House