1993 · Graham Nelson · Text adventure

Curses

In the course of searching the attic for an old tourist map of Paris, Victor Meldrew steps into a surreal adventure to uncover a centuries-old curse that has been placed on his family.

Released: 1993
Platforms: Windows Z-machine macOS
Genres: Text adventure
Developers: Graham Nelson
Publishers: —
Modes: Single-player
Perspective: Text
Themes: Fantasy
Engine: Z-machine
Country: United Kingdom

About

Curses is an interactive fiction computer game created by Graham Nelson in 1993. Appearing in the beginning of the non-commercial era of interactive fiction, it is considered one of the milestones of the genre.

Writing for The New York Times, Edward Rothstein described the game as "acclaimed."

Keywords

interactive fiction

The articlegameplay, story, development, reception

Story

The player plays the part of the current owner of Meldrew Hall. In the course of searching the attic for an old tourist map of Paris, the protagonist steps into a surreal adventure to uncover a centuries-old curse that has been placed on the Meldrew family. The goal of the game is to find the missing map, and thus annul the curse.

Development

Curses was originally developed on an Acorn Archimedes using Acorn C/C++, before Nelson moved to his Inform programming language, which was simultaneously released. It was the first non-test game developed in the language. It is distributed without charge as a Z-Code executable. The Inform source code is not publicly available.