Many parody well-known fantasy or fairy tale characters, so there’s usually something familiar but still a bit off about them. There’s also quite a bit of fourth wall breakage, not only with Simon turning to the screen and commenting, but with very explicit mentions about being in an adventure game.Įven though most of the characters you meet fall between “slightly odd” and “downright weird”, there’s some level of charm to most of them. It’s a very distinct character of British humour, and while it can be off-putting to some, it does give the game a fairly unique voice, even if initial appearances might prove otherwise. It might seem initially that Simon comes off a bit snotty, but to be fair, most of the other characters in the world are, in their own ways, stupid and annoying too, so they pretty much deserve any verbal beatdowns they have coming to them. Nearly every character can be greeted with an insult and the rest of the conversations can be continued down much the same road. He doesn’t really want to be a wizard, and he certainly doesn’t want to save to kingdom he just wants to get on with the whole spiel and find his way home. By comparison, Simon is much, much snarkier.
In the first two Monkey Island games, Guybrush is a bit naive, maybe a bit of a troublemaker, and occasionally a bit sarcastic. Even right at the beginning of the game you can walk into a bar, talk with some folks, and accomplish a few tasks to become a wizard.īeyond that, though, the tone is actually quite a bit different, and that largely lies with the main character. If the interface design wasn’t a tip off, the quest starts off in much the same way – a young kid sets off on a simple quest through a fantasy environment, filled with bizarre and quirky characters. Unfortunately it lacks the right-click context sensitive actions of LucasArts games, but the interface can highlight all of the hotspots on the screen, an extremely useful feature that also carried forward to most of the future games. The menu bar is almost exactly the same, with a few verbs added in like “Wear” and “Consume”. On the surface, Simon the Sorcerer also shares more than a few similarities with Monkey Island, which the Woodroffes acknowledge as an obvious inspiration. After wandering around the game world – which includes a small town and a fairly expansive forest – Simon will pick up a bit of skill to give him a fighting chance against the nefarious Sordid.
Although he wears a garish purple wizard outfit, complete with a goofy hat, Simon actually isn’t very skilled at magic… at least, at first. His quest, detailed by a note left on the table, is to rescue the good wizard Calypso, who has been kidnapped by the bad wizard Sordid. Just a bit bewildered, Simon follows him, only to end up in a medieval realm called the Magic Kingdom. Simon the Sorcerer begins in the house of an average British teenager, whose dog wanders into the attic and disappears into a chest.
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(Another developer a few years down the line was able to secure the Discworld license for its own series of games, which turned out alright, although Simon is distinct enough to stand apart from its obvious inspiration.) They weren’t able to, so they created their own fantasy universe in a similar style, and thus was born Simon the Sorcerer.
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After tiring of working on horror themed games, their name was changed to Adventure Soft, and they tried to obtain the license for Discworld, a series of comedic fantasy novels by Terry Pratchett. Although they initially worked on porting Scott Adams’ text adventures to British micros, they eventually formed Horrorsoft and created a few games based on the horror hostess Elvira.
It all began with Simon and Mike Woodroffe in the early ’80s, owners of a computer shop in Birmingham. It’s probably just a result of them not finding proper distribution, because any fan of British humour will find a lot to like in the Simon series. It’s not that the humor doesn’t translate – people all over still appreciate British classics like Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Fawlty Towers, or more recent series like The Office and The IT Crowd. It’s a bit of a weird situation – since the series’ inception, the Simon the Sorcerer games have been quite popular in their homeland of Great Britain, as well as the rest of Europe, but they never remotely caught on in North America. Adventure Soft’s Simon the Sorcerer is one such series. That didn’t stop numerous other European outfits from trying their hands at things, and some of the better entries rival the quality of games from the other side of the pond. For quite awhile, the adventure gaming scene was dominated by American companies like LucasArts and Sierra.
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