MacVenture

The MacVenture games is a series of four adventure games introducing a characteristic menu-based point-and-click interface. They were originally developed for the Apple Macintosh by ICOM Simulations:

All these games have been released on other platforms including Commodore Amiga, Apple II, Atari ST, Commodore 64, IBM Personal Computer (PC), Pocket PC and Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). This article is about the original Macintosh versions which introduced new interface ideas to the adventure game genre and were blueprints for the other versions.

The MacVenture engine was written in 1985 for the first game in the series, Déjà Vu. Making the entire game fit together with system software on two 400 k single-sided floppy disks proved to be quite a challenge and special image compression routines had to be written to accomplish this.

A handful of sequels such as Beyond Shadowgate and Shadowgate 64 were later made, with only the background story in common with the MacVenture games. The rights to the MacVentures are currently maintained by Zojoi.

The "MacVenture" name was used in loading screens and about boxes – in the original releases for other platforms it was translated, e.g. "Atari Venture" or "PC Venture". MacVenture is the only of these used for referring to the game series in other contexts.

The MacVenture team had the following contributors to all four titles:

The following people had part in the development of some of the games, as noted:

The game interface is laid out in a once-novel "desktop" style in which objects are taken from the environment and added to the player's possessions by dragging and dropping them into the "inventory," and in which there are standard menu commands such as "Save as…". Multiple objects can be selected and used at the same time by shift-clicking, and there is even a "Clean up" command which sorts out the inventory in the same way as in the Finder (unlike the Finder, there is also a "Mess up" command). Much as with any non-game application, the various game windows can be rearranged according to taste and the font of the text window changed as well. The MacVenture games use the Macintosh's built in widget toolkit for the user interface which adds to the feeling of the game as a regular application.

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