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''Curses'' is an
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
interactive fiction
Interactive fiction (IF) is software simulating environments in which players use text Command (computing), commands to control Player character, characters and influence the environment. Works in this form can be understood as literary narrati ...
computer game
A video game or computer game is an electronic game that involves interaction with a user interface or input device (such as a joystick, controller, keyboard, or motion sensing device) to generate visual feedback from a display device, mo ...
created by Graham Nelson
Graham A. Nelson (born 1968) is a British mathematician, poet, and the creator of the Inform, Inform design system for creating interactive fiction (IF) games. He has authored several IF games, including ''Curses (computer game), Curses'' (1993) ...
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
''The New York Times'' (''NYT'') is an American daily newspaper based in New York City. ''The New York Times'' covers domestic, national, and international news, and publishes opinion pieces, investigative reports, and reviews. As one of ...
'', Edward Rothstein described the game as "acclaimed."
Plot
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
Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, largest city of France. With an estimated population of 2,048,472 residents in January 2025 in an area of more than , Paris is the List of ci ...
, the protagonist steps into a surreal adventure to uncover a centuries-old curse
A curse (also called an imprecation, malediction, execration, malison, anathema, or commination) is any expressed wish that some form of adversity or misfortune will befall or attach to one or more persons, a place, or an object. In particular, ...
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 anAcorn Archimedes
The Acorn Archimedes is a family of personal computers designed by Acorn Computers of Cambridge, England. The systems in this family use Acorn's own ARM architecture processors and initially ran the Arthur operating system, with later models ...
using Acorn C/C++
Acorn C/C++ is a set of C/ C++ programming tools for use under the operating system. The tools use the Norcroft compiler suite and were authored by Codemist and Acorn Computers. The tools provide some facilities offered by a fully integrated ...
, before Nelson moved to his Inform
Inform is a programming language and design system for interactive fiction originally created in 1993 by Graham Nelson. Inform can generate programs designed for the Z-machine, Z-code or Glulx virtual machines. Versions 1 through 5 were released ...
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
In computing, source code, or simply code or source, is a plain text computer program written in a programming language. A programmer writes the human readable source code to control the behavior of a computer.
Since a computer, at base, only ...
is not publicly available.
Innovations
''Curses'' contains some innovations that contribute to its appeal. * Managing the player's inventory by automatically placing items in a container to make room for an object needed in hand (such as placing an item in the rucksack when reading an entry in a book), eliminating the tedium of having to manually drop one item before picking up another. * Commands ''places'' and ''objects'', displaying all the locations visited and all the objects seen during the game.See also
* ''Jigsaw'', another Graham Nelson game, from 1995References
External links
* {{IFDB, id=plvzam05bmz3enh8, title=Curses; the entry has some coverage, reviews, and links to both the original release (version 7) and the most recent one (version 16) 1993 video games 1990s interactive fiction Video games about curses Video games developed in the United Kingdom Single-player video games