Silicon Dreams trilogy

Infobox VG
title = Silicon Dreams


developer = Level 9 Computing
publisher = Firebird - United States
Rainbird - Europe
designer = Snowball
Nick Austin, Mike Austin and Pete Austin with additional help from Ian Buxton.
Return to Eden
Nick Austin and Chris Queen with art by Tim Noyce
The Worm in Paradise
Nick Austin, Mike Austin and Pete Austin with art by James Horsler
engine = 32K virtual machine (custom)
released = 1986
genre = Adventure game
modes = Single-player
ratings =
platforms = Amiga, Amstrad CPC, Amstrad PCW, Apple II, Atari 8-bit family, Atari ST, BBC Micro, Commodore 64, DOS, Macintosh, MSX, Sinclair QL, ZX Spectrum
media = Compact Cassette or Floppy disk
requirements = No special requirements
input = Computer keyboard

"Silicon Dreams" is a trilogy of interactive fiction games developed by Level 9 Computing during the 1980s. The first game was "Snowball", released in 1983, followed a year later by "Return to Eden", and then by "The Worm in Paradise" in 1985. The following year they appeared together in a bundle as the first, second and last of the Silicon Dreams. Early advertisements gave it the title of "Silicon Dream", but it was later pluralised.cite web | last = Schmidt | first = Miron | coauthors = Schulz, Manuel | date = 1999-01-25 | url = http://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/level9/info/Level9_Facts.txt | title = Level 9 Fact Sheet | accessdate = 2007-10-08 | work = The Interactive Fiction Archive]

As most Level 9 games, the trilogy used a proprietary interpreted language called A-code and appeared on all major home computer platforms of the time, such as Amiga, Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum, on either diskette or cassette. Level 9 self-published each game separately, but the bundle was published by Telecomsoft, which sold it in the United Sates under the Firebird label and in Europe under the Rainbird label.

The trilogy is set in a not too-distant future when humans have started colonising space. For the first two instalments the player takes the role of Kim Kimberly, an undercover agent, whose goal in "Snowball" is to save the colonist's spacecraft from crashing into a star, and in "Return to Eden" to stop the defence system at the destination planet of Eden from destroying the craft. In the "The Worm in Paradise", the player, taking on the role of an unnamed citizen of Eden, must travel around the city of Enoch, learn it's secrets, earn money and save the planet.

Gameplay

The games were developed using Level 9's own A-Code engine and the gameplay is controlled through the use of a text parser for entering commands at the "What now?" prompt.cite web | author = Level 9 Computing | year = 1983 | url = ftp://ftp.worldofspectrum.org/pub/sinclair/games-info/s/Snowball.txt | title = Snowball instructions | accessdate = 2008-07-20] The parser can interpret more than 1000 words [cite journal | last = Medley | first = Sue | title = Silicon Dreams review | journal = SynTax | issue = 2 | publisher = SynTax | date = 1989-09 | url = http://www.syntax2000.co.uk/issues/02/silirev.asc.txt | format = TXT | accessdate = 2008-07-20] to control movement or actions. It looks at the command, picking out two or three words it knows, ignoring the order, and tries to guess what is meant. For movement, the usual commands for moving 'NORTH', 'SOUTH', 'EAST' and 'WEST' are available (and their abbreviated form of 'N', 'S', 'E' and 'W') as well as 'UP' and 'DOWN' ('U' and 'D' respectively) and a number of other directions and 'modes' of movement (like 'JUMP'). For actions, it understands how to pick up objects, opening doors, lighting lamps, as well as dropping objects and wielding them. Additionally, there are commands to invoke 'SAVE' and 'RESTORE' of game positions to cassette tape or floppy disk (for some systems also to RAM), ask for 'HELP', turn off pictures and turn them on again with 'WORDS' and 'PICTURES' respectively, an 'OOPS' command to undo previous commands.Citation | author-link = Level 9 Computing | year = 1986 | title = Silicon Dreams: Loading Instructions and Gameplay Guide | publisher = Level 9 Computing]

"Silicon Dreams" can be played as three separate games, but to obtain a maximum score, the games must be completed in order, carrying the score from one adventure to the next. Points are not scored for collecting treasures, but rather for doing specific tasks towards the aim of the individual game:

"Snowball": The mission is to get to the main control room in the engine unit, and rescue the starship from crashing into the planet Eden.

"Return to Eden": The objective is to get into the city of Enoch, and stop the Eden robots from destroying Snowball 9.

"Worm in Paradise": The aim is to find as much information about the city as possible, obtain money, and then become a member of the governing party of Eden, saving the planet in the process.

etting

The trilogy starts during a time when the human race is literally reaching for the stars. After linking the entire Solar System through accelerator chains, the "Big 5" nations of Earth (China, EEC, Pacific, US Empire and USSR) set in motion a plan to colonise the galaxy know as the Terran Expansionary Phase. It lasted 90 years from 2120 to 2210.

The first step was to launch probes into outer space. The probes reported any Earth-sized planet they encountered during their voyage, which would last centuries. Each probe was followed by a survey ship 10 years later. The ship's mission was to map the planet and if it was habitable, it would signal Earth and then, while waiting for the colonists to arrive, terraform the planet.

Terraforming was a complex process. The survey ship needed to mine materials from asteroids to build a robot factory in space and this could take decades. The robots then proceeded to build more space factories that in turn would produce better robots. The robots also built large satellite dishes to collect data sent from Earth containing the latest technological advances. Then the actual terraforming took place. The robots landed on the planet and started to build cities while also launching more probes and survey ships further into space.

Once Earth received news of a habitable planet, the plan's third and final step took place. Ten giant passenger discs, each carrying 200,000 colonists in stasis, were towed into space. Next came the engine unit, which was linked a week later to the front of the discs, and then the colony ship was completed and ready to go.

During the 2190s, 50 colony ships were launched from the EEC's Ceres base, among them the "Snowball 9", which carried the first colonists for planet Eden on the Eridani A system. For the next three years, the accelerator chains beyond Pluto fired ten-ton blocks of ammonia ice at the travelling ship. The "Snowball 9" caught the ice blocks with hooks and piled it around the passenger discs, forming a hollow shell that would cover most of the ship and would serve as a shield until it was needed to fuel the fusion engines on the later part of the trip. This ice shell gave the Snowball series its name.

After receiving the last ice block, the crew put the ship in autopilot and went to hibernate with the passengers, leaving the ship's maintenance to robots. Except for a brief period of activity to start deceleration, the crew slept for most of the trip, waking up one year before reaching Eden. The plan was to continue deceleration while consuming the last of the ice shell, and then put the ship in orbit around the planet, delivering the passengers down by gliders that would be retrieved by hooks to be reused.

Kim Kimberly

Kim Kimberley is a tall, athletic, intelligent woman with brown eyes and fair hair. She was born on September 29, 2172 AD, and was raised at Hampstead Crèche, which was closed when she was 13 due to violations of the Android Protection Acts. She finished her education at the Milton Keynes School of Life in Malta, then returned to England for National Service. She started out doing standard security work with the occasional surveillance of subversive members of society, but ended working as a counter-espionage agent. Still in her twenties, Kim accepted to travel undercover on the "Snowball 9" to be there as the last resort for the worst-case scenario.

nowball

Plot

As the "Snowball 9" approached Eden, however, something goes wrong: a crewmember becameomes insane. She murders her shipmates, destroys the communication system and set the ship on a collision course with the sun. The robots, being little more than automata, continue their eveyday operations oblivious to the danger but the ship's computer, capable of thinking, wakes up secret agent Kim Kimberley before the deranged crewmember destroyes it. She exits her modified stasis chamber with the goal of finding a way to reach the control room, armed with nothing but her wits and whatever tools she might find, and avert disaster.

Development

"Snowball" was originally released in with minimal descriptions. [cite web | last = Granade | first = Stephen | url = http://brasslantern.org/community/history/level9.html | title = History of Interactive Fiction: Level 9 | accessdate = 2007-10-08 | work = Brass Lantern]

Another peculiar aspect of the game was the confusion behind the main character's gender. In an interview for "Sinclair User", Chris Bourne asked: "Is the androgynous Kim a man or woman?" Pete Austin pointed out that "there's a credit at the end for the design of 'Ms Kimberley's costume,'" but also admitted that Kim Kimberley was "a deliberately unisex name."cite journal | last = Bourne | first = Chris | year = 1985 | month = May | title = Hit Squad: On the level | journal = Sinclair User | issue = 38 | pages = 60–62 | url = http://www.sincuser.f9.co.uk/038/htsquad.htm | accessdate = 2007-10-08 ] The debate came to an end with the release of "Return to Eden", where it was made clear that Kim was not a man, because the surviving crewmembers confuse her with the woman who tried to destroy the ship.

Return to Eden

Plot

With the "Snowball 9" orbiting Eden, the surviving crewmembers put Kim on trial. The only evidence against her is the "mempak" from the control room, which shows her as the hijacker rather than the saviour. Despite the fact that the recording is damaged and thus is unreliable, they sentence her to death. About to be thrown into space, Kim manages to escape aboard a "stratoglider". An hour later, she lands on Eden, which is when the game starts.

The first thing the player must do is find a shelter for Kim, because a few moves into the game the "Snowball 9" crew use the ship's engine to try to burn her down. The native robots take this as proof that the "Snowball 9" is not the human ship they were expecting but a hostile alien craft they must destroy. The objective is to contact the robots before time runs out for the "Snowball 9" and everyone aboard it.

Development

Unlike its predecessor, "Return to Eden" only had around 250 locations, [cite journal | last = Price | first = Richard | year = 1985 | month = January | title = Spectrum Software Scene: Snowbound in Eden | journal = Sinclair User | issue = 34 | pages = 50 | url = http://www.sincuser.f9.co.uk/034/sftwre.htm | accessdate = 2007-10-08 ] but it was the first game of the trilogy to feature graphics. Other adventure games had included graphics before, but with version 2 of the A-Code system, Level 9 managed to encode a location graphics into as little as 40 bytes per picture hence making it possible to add graphics to every location of the game for all formats with more than 32 KiB. The user could choose not to display them and play the game in text-only mode. It was released for the same platforms as its predecessor.cite web | last = Meier | first = Stefan | coauthors = Persson, Hans | url = http://adventure.if-legends.org/Level_9_Computing.html | title = Level 9 Computing | accessdate = 2008-07-20 | work = Adventureland]

The game's first cover depicted a robot fighting a monster plant in Enoch. The robot resembled a comic book character, so to avoid legal troubles, Level 9 commissioned Godfrey Dowson to do a new cover. Dowson's illustration depicted another robot in the jungle looking towards Enoch. Level 9 was not satisfied with the result and asked Dowson to do it again. They liked the third cover so much, they hired Dowson to do artwork for the re-release of their old games as well as for their future titles. [cite web | last = Hewison | first = Richard | url = http://ifguide.if-legends.org/essays/Level-9.html | title = Level 9: Past masters of the adventure game | accessdate = 2008-07-20]

The Worm in Paradise

Plot

A hundred years after the arrival of colonists aboard the "Snowball 9", planet Eden has become home to half a billion people. In this paradise run by robots there's no crime, no taxes, no unemployment, and no freedom. The population lives in domed "megapolis," and perhaps due to the war that took place during "Return to Eden", there's no contact between the cities and the surrounding natural world. The occasional sighting of flying saucers keeps the population afraid from going outside.

The main character, a nameless citizen of Enoch, starts the game in a beautiful garden where everything seems fine. He picks an apple from a tree, a worm pops out, and the player follows it outside the garden, through the desert, and then he wakes up. It was only a Reveline simulation, one of the many forms of entertainment available under the reign of the third Kim. This "Garden of Eden as a prison" allegory sets the mood for the entire game. The objective is to explore the city, and while doing so the player must gather clues to unmask the government conspiracy behind the flying saucers.

Development

The trilogy's final installment is a departure from the previous games. It "evolved alongside a 12 month enhancement on Level 9's own adventure system. Standard features include a 1,000 word vocabulary, a very highly advanced English input, memory enhancing-text compression, the now familiar and very much appreciated type-ahead, and multi-tasking so a player need never wait while a picture is drawn." [cite journal | last = Brewster | first = Derek | year = 1986 | month = March | title = The Worm in Paradise | journal = "CRASH" | issue = 26 | pages = 91–92 | url = http://www.crashonline.org.uk/26/worm.htm | accessdate = 2007-10-07] This was the first game using version 3 of the A-Code system. It was released for four fewer platforms, leaving out the Lynx, Memotech MTX, Nascom and Oric-1 compared to the two previous releases.

Another departure is that the player has only seven days, within the game's clock, to complete the game. Quests are also time-based and require that the player arrive at certain locations at specific hours to achieve the desired goal. And while gameplay remains the same, the backdrop is no longer an action adventure, but a political thriller that resembles the dystopian novel "Nineteen Eighty-Four". Similar to what happened when "Snowball" was released, there was certain confusion about the main character's identity and the time when the story took place. The "Level 9 Fact Sheet" says: "...a couple of years later, Kim Kimberley has become a legend on Eden." Another article stated: "Worm in Paradise is set 100 years later. You are now Kim Kimberley III..." [cite journal | last = Manor | first = John | year = 1988 | month = August | title = 8-bit product reviews: Silicon Dreams | journal = "ANTIC" | issue = vol. 7, no. 4 | pages = 41 | url = http://www.atarimagazines.com/v7n4/8bitreviews.html | accessdate = 2007-10-07] Furthermore, Pete Austin said: "Worm is set on Eden, about 50 years in the future" and "The player is not Kim - she becomes mayor and runs the place." Notice that these sources called the game by its original name, "Worm in Paradise".

The trilogy

"Silicon Dreams" was the second title published by Telecomsoft, the first being "Jewels of Darkness", in an four-game publishing deal signed by level 9 in April 1986. [cite journal | year = 1988 | month = March | title = News | journal = | accessdate = 2008-07-25]

The "Rainbird" release came in a 215 x 153 x 27 mm cardboard box while the "Firebird" release came in a 227 x 163 x 30 mm black, plastic box. Both featured a 150 x 210 mm, 68-page booklet with loading instructions, a guide to playing the game and Peter McBride's novella "Eden Song" which served as an introduction to "The Worm in Paradise". The novella was also used as a copy-protection device, from which, upon restore of a saved game, the player had to enter a word from a page and line reference.

Reception

All games were released individually and generally received good initial reviews. "Snowball" won the Best Text-only Adventure prize at "Crash" 1984 "Readers Awards", [cite journal | year = 1984/85 | month = Christmas special | title = Crash Readers Awards 1984 | journal = | issue = 48 | pages = 70-71 | url = http://www.sincuser.f9.co.uk/048/worminp.htm | accessdate = 2008-07-25 ]

When the trilogy was released it received unanimously, good reviews from the ZX Spectrum press: | accessdate = 2008-07-25] However, some reviews found the graphics "...truly abysmal. Blotchy, often unrecognizable...simple in design..." while others called it "...smidgens better than those added to "Jewel of Darkness", possibly even two smidgens, and are far from being the disappointment."

The ZX Spectrum version was placed fourth in September [cite journal | year = 1987 | month = September | title = Street Life | journal = | accessdate = 2008-09-06] of the "Your Sinclair" adventure charts.

References

External links

*Nintendo DS port of Silicon Dreams available at [http://gugusse.central.free.fr/papafuji/adventures.html Papafuji's DS Adventure Page]
* [http://www.if-legends.org/~l9memorial/html/sdt.html The Level 9 Memorial]
* [http://www.wurb.com/if/series/38 Baf's Guide to the Interactive Fiction Archive]
* [http://www.crashonline.org.uk/06/snowbal.htm "Snowball" review] at Crash - The Online Edition
* [http://www.crashonline.org.uk/26/worm.htm "Worm in Paradise" review] at Crash - The Online Edition
*moby game|id=-group/silicon-dreams-series
*WoS game|id=0011350
* [http://www.birdsanctuary.co.uk/silicon/d.php "Silicon Dreams trilogy"] at The Bird Sanctuary
* [http://www.geocities.com/jeremyalansmith/level9/silicond.htm "Eden Song"] available at [http://www.geocities.com/jeremyalansmith/level9/ Retro Reading: The Game Novellas Homepage]