Topologika Software Ltd was an independent

British British may refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * British people, nationals or natives of the United Kingdom, British Overseas Territories, and Crown Dependencies. ** Britishness, the British identity and common culture * British English, ...

publisher of educational software. Established in Stilton, Cambridgeshire in 1983, the company spent most of its life in Penryn, Cornwall before moving to Brighton, Sussex. The company was dissolved at the end of June 2013. Its educational software continues to be sold by distributors REM via, and is still supported by Topologika's founder Brian Kerslake. One of the educational software products was

Music Box A music box (American English) or musical box (British English) is an automatic musical instrument in a box that produces musical notes by using a set of pins placed on a revolving cylinder or disc to pluck the tuned teeth (or ''lamellae'') ...

. Many of its early products were

interactive fiction '' 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 ...

adventure game An adventure game is a video game genre in which the player assumes the role of a protagonist in an interactive story driven by exploration and/or Puzzle video game, puzzle-solving. The Video game genres, genre's focus on story allows it to draw ...

s taken on after

Acornsoft Acornsoft was the software arm of Acorn Computers, and a major publisher of software for the BBC Micro and Acorn Electron. As well as games, it also produced a large number of educational titles, extra computer languages and business and util ...

was sold to

Superior Software Superior Software Ltd (also known as Superior Interactive) is a video game publisher. It was one of the main publishers for the BBC Micro and Acorn Electron computers in the 1980s and early 1990s. It currently releases games for Microsoft Windows ...

who only continued to release their arcade games. Two of its first releases were

Countdown to Doom ''Countdown to Doom'' is a text adventure game written by Peter Killworth for the BBC Micro and published by Acornsoft in 1982. It is set on the planet Doomawangara, which is coyly shortened to "Doom". An Acorn Electron version was released in 19 ...

and

Philosopher's Quest The following list of text-based games is not to be considered an authoritative, comprehensive listing of all such games; rather, it is intended to represent a wide range of game styles and genres presented using the text mode display and their ...

, written by

Peter Killworth Professor Peter D. Killworth (27 March 1946 – 28 January 2008) was an English scientist known for his work on oceanography and on the study of social networks. A prolific writer, he published more than 160 scientific papers over the course o ...

. The versions produced by Topologika were large scale improvements upon the originals. The complete list of adventure games produced by Topologika was as follows: *Acheton *Avon *

*Giant Killer *Hezarin *Kingdom of Hamil *Monsters of Murdac *Philosopher's Quest *Return to Doom *Sellardore Tales *

Spy Snatcher ''Spy Snatcher'' is a floppy disk-based text adventure released by Topologika Software in 1988. It was the last professional text adventure to be released on the BBC Micro and Acorn Electron. It was also released for ZX Spectrum ( +3 disk only), RI ...

*Stig of the Dump *The Last Days of Doom Topologika has itself now ceased publishing interactive fiction other than as an element of its ongoing and growing range of educational software which now includes Marshal Anderson's interactive fiction on CD and for VLEs (Sellardore Tales and Stig of the Dump) and Peter Killworth's maths adventure GiantKiller.

References

External links

Topologika's website
*

* ttps://web.archive.org/web/20070222200131/http://www.topologika.com/product.php?file=sellardore Info on Sellardore Tales
Info on Stig of the Dump

Stig and Sellardore's author
Computer companies of the United Kingdom Educational software companies {{ict-corp-stub