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Return to Castle Dracula

Michael Lambert 1985

Language:
English
Authors:
Michael Lambert
Systems:
BASIC info
Platforms:
C64/128 info, Spectrum
Genres:
(unreleased game) info, Horror
Entered by:
Alex, Gunness, NomadColossus, Strident
Added:
20-10-2010
Edited:
28-01-2025

Synopsis

You play this game as yourself, following in the footsteps of Jonathan Harker (from 1897)! The date is not specified by it would have been at least 30 years after the events of Bram Stoker's Dracula!

You travel to Transylvania and stay in the same hotel Jonathan did in the book (the Golden Krone Hotel). Your mission is to explore the Count's castle for evidence that he is back from the dead! As you have rumours of such. But first you must explore the village to pick up items you will need to enter the castle (as with Melbourne House's Castle of Terror).

These include the normal tropes - garlic, a wooden stake, a key to enter the castle etc.

Once in the castle you explore the rooms looking for ways to kill Dracula!

Notes

Based loosely on the Scott Adams adventure.

According to the author, the game was never officially released but seems to have been passed around the C64 text adventure playing community.

Resources (Upload file)

Solution
by Dorothy
Further Info:

[+] Users who have solved this game

[+] Users currently playing this game

Images

Image
Return_to_Castle_Dracula.png

Rating

Average User Rating: 7 (1 rating)

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User Comments

NomadColossus (18-06-2021 13:18)

I wrote this adveture game after reading Bram Stoker's book 'Dracula'. But I was also inspired by Scott Adams 'The Count' adventure, which I really enjoyed ; )

This was in 1985 when I was just 17 years old xD! The only reason I never finished the game was that I ran out of memory... that is I think I did, as when I tried to add more to my BASIC program I would get the error 'out of memory'.

Until recently, I never knew my game had been made into a ROM. I did send my BASIC file to 'Dorthory' (back then), so I can only surmise that she converted the file to a ROM and uploaded it here (without my permission that is)... But whatever, that was 36 years ago! (Damn I'm old!)

I was also inspired by the Level 9 adventure games, especially 'Lords of Time', as you could examine every item no matter how insignificant. One example was a candle I picked up, when I examined it the response was 'wax'. In the Count by Scott Adams, you could even examine the 'dust' in the room where you lock your items away, so the Count can't steal them... when I examined the dust the response was 'Achoo!'xD. Also when you examined the toilet you got the response 'Ahh, that's better'!

So, in my game I tried to emulate this by adding as much text about each item as I could. I never got around to adding so many 'help' responses, but I think a few are still in there. I even made images for each location in Adobe Illustrator that I wanted (someday) to add to the game. I wish I could finish this game the way I wanted, but the C64 memory was insufficient for my purposes.

I tried starting over using 'Adrif IF maker', which is supposed to be a user friendly way to make adventure games, but it didn't work for me. It didn't support the detailed nuances that I wanted that I could do using BASIC on the C64.

So that is my story. Hope you enjoyed reading it. I still want to finish this game some day. Is there a way to add more memory to the C64 using an emulator or something? I want to add images and a lot more BASIC programming.

If you know how please leave a comment here ; )

Strident (18-06-2021 20:12)

Interesting stuff. I notice the game is listed here for the Spectrum. Was it ever actually produced for that machine?

If you're looking for a new text adventure language then something like PunyInform (a variant of Inform) might interest you as you can target 8-bit machines like the C64. It doesn't support graphics, though.

DAAD is another option (and does support graphics on disk through add-ons like Maluva).

Depending on exactly what nuances you want, they're both capable of creating highly customised adventure games.