''Sherlock'' is a 1984

text adventure '' Interactive fiction, often abbreviated IF, is software simulating environments in which players use text commands to control characters and influence the environment. Works in this form can be understood as literary narratives, either in the ...

developed under the lead of Philip Mitchell by

Beam Software Krome Studios Melbourne, originally Melbourne House, was an Australian video game developer, video game development studio founded in 1980 by Alfred Milgrom and Naomi Milgrom, Naomi Besen and based in Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia. Initially ...

. It was published by Melbourne House. Five programmers worked for 18 months on the title and a Sherlock Holmes expert was employed full-time for a year to advise the team on accuracy. Technically, the adventure builds upon the 1982 title ''

The Hobbit ''The Hobbit, or There and Back Again'' is a children's fantasy novel by English author J. R. R. Tolkien. It was published in 1937 to wide critical acclaim, being nominated for the Carnegie Medal and awarded a prize from the '' ...

''. Autonomous NPCs and realtime gameplay, two sophisticated features of ''The Hobbit'', are present in ''Sherlock'' - as is ''Inglish'', the parser responsible for analyzing the player's commands. The game simulated 'real time'; trains ran to a time table and key plot events began at exactly specified moments. There was also an attempt to move beyond 'instructional' communication with characters (in which non-player characters are told or asked to complete actions the player does not wish to or is unable to complete) to 'dialogic' communication in which characters could be questioned, challenged and persuaded with evidence. The latter was an early attempt to simulate changing states of consciousness within an interactive narrative.

Plot

A double murder has been committed in the town of

Leatherhead Leatherhead is a town in the Mole Valley District of Surrey, England, about south of Central London. The settlement grew up beside a ford on the River Mole, from which its name is thought to derive. During the late Anglo-Saxon period, Leath ...

and Dr. Watson has encouraged the player, who plays Holmes, to investigate.

Inspector Lestrade Detective Inspector G. Lestrade, or Mr. Lestrade ( or ), is a fictional character appearing in several of the Sherlock Holmes stories written by Arthur Conan Doyle. Lestrade's first appearance was in the first Sherlock Holmes story, the novel ...

is also investigating.

Bugs

The game is notorious for a large number of surreal and amusing bugs due to the complex potential interactions between characters. For example: * Policemen can still talk, and obstruct Holmes, while unconscious. * Hansom cab drivers can blame Holmes for anyone who fails to pay their fare anywhere on the map, can be used to force improper objects (such as trains) to appear inside cabs, and can be confused into driving the player into a null location which is used as the store for nouns, allowing Holmes to pick up items such as "innocent", "your alibi" and "an opium den". * Inspector Lestrade normally arrests the wrong man early in the game, causing a Game Over unless Holmes has shown the man's innocence; however, Holmes can also wait for Lestrade to get in a cab, then tell his cabbie from outside to drive to a random location, causing Lestrade to freeze because he doesn't know what to do there. * Watson is described as "the only character with a memory", but if the player allows Watson to see too many events happening, his memory overflows the available RAM of the system and the game crashes.

References

External links

*
Images of ''Sherlock'' package, manual and screen shots

* {{Sherlock Holmes video games 1980s interactive fiction 1984 video games Commodore 64 games Detective video games Interactive fiction based on works Video games based on Sherlock Holmes Video games developed in Australia Video games set in Surrey ZX Spectrum games