Here we have another landmark of the genre. This game was made by adventure game power-duo Roberta and Ken Williams. I think it’s safe to say that Roberta especially is a visionary in the adventure game genre and in computer games as a whole. She went on to create a long list of successful games for Sierra Entertainment (which in 1980 was known as “On-Line Systems”), including the iconic “King’s Quest” series. She’s not without her share of critics, though–she is notorious for some incredibly impenetrable puzzles. Then again, she’s hardly the only game designer to craft impossible puzzles. This isn’t the last we’ll be hearing from her on this blog, either.
So why is this game a landmark accomplishment? This was the very first adventure game to have graphics! That was an amazing accomplishment for the time, but for the modern gamer the illustrations in this game are truly cringeworthy. Every time the player enters a new room, she watches the illustration appear, line by painstaking line, until it creates something several degrees less sophisticated than the line art in something like XKCD. Despite the fact that it led to some truly fugly art, this was a major innovation in 1980. The Williamses used a now long-forgotten piece of technology called a VersaWriter that could translate line drawings into graphics for the Apple II. The only problem is that the VersaWriter appears to have afforded all the room for loving, artistic detail as a MagnaDoodle. To learn more about the tech side of things, as always I recommend Jimmy Maher’s wide and deep coverage of this space.
To get a sense of what we’re working with, check out Wikipedia’s snapshot of the opening scene. This is the very first thing you see and it’s actually one of the more sophisticated drawings in the game, but the player would have no way of knowing that this is supposed to be a “Victorian house” if the game didn’t tell her so. Despite its limitations, the game was a roaring success. Writing in Computer Gaming World, critic Mark Marlow describes the game as having a “wonderfully Victorian setting.” This seems highly risible to me looking back from 2024, but people truly found this game captivating. The past is another country.
What about the mystery side of things? Well, it tries harder to present us with a genuine mystery than anything we’ve seen so far, but it’s extremely easy to figure out who the serial killer is, especially when she outright attacks the player. This is the level of clues on display in this game—the killer’s name is Daisy and one of the victims was found holding a daisy!!! That makes sense, right? Still, it’s a step forward in sophistication–we have seven suspects, they’ve all been given names instead of being assigned numbers, and we even learn their hair colors and jobs. (Another supposed “clue” is a stray blond hair found on a body.) There’s also a motive–everyone is scrambling to find jewels that for some reason have wound up in an abandoned house. We also know the weapons involved—Daisy tries to stab us, and she apparently strangled the poor butcher with her pantyhose.
Unfortunately, this doesn’t add up to what I would call a satisfying mystery. The game’s extremely sparse on details and there’s not much mystery who the killer is when she outright attacks you. The whole treasure hunt aspect beggars belief, but there was apparently a mindset where every adventure game had to have some kind of treasure hunt, another legacy of Colossal Cave Adventure. The clues are extremely basic and perfunctory and we don’t dig into the details of things such as a timeline of when the murders occurred. This impact of Mystery House is monumental in the history of video games and its historical significance can’t be ignored, but I can’t recommend it for players today unless your favorite art form is cave paintings.
Oryx & Cake Boss 
