One of the all time best adventure games is the brilliant Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis – a game so good that it’s considered by many to be the fourth film in the series set after The Last Crusade. It’s a genuinely thrilling adventure that feels as close to being Indy as it possibly could be without actually being born Harrison Ford.
The game hasn’t been released on that many platforms but it’s a 16bit era classic that did amazingly well on PC and Amiga. Unfortunately it never made it to the Atari ST so I never got to play it on release (the so-so action game wasn’t anywhere near as good as this version).
ScummVM is a tool that is being used to make Scumm games (the format created by LucasArts) available more widely – it requires you to own an original game but then allows converts it to be usable on other platforms. Indeed – I have a working version of Fate of Atlantis itself on my Atari Falcon now and I’m actually playing through the story for the first time in a couple of decades.
So – I thought let’s see if the ZX Spectrum Next could handle it… It’s an impressive computer and it can actually do more in some cases than the Amiga 500 so I took a look at what options there are, and someone had already created a version of ScummVM for the Next based around the NES version of Maniac Mansion… So I’ve taken a fork of that code and gone off on my own little journey to see what I can do.
So far I have all of the screens from the game loading in with every object, every mask and every walkbox as defined in the original game supported. I can move Indy (slowly) around each scene using keyboard input – mouse and routefinding coming later – and he can nicely move behind in-world objects as intended. Next steps are sprite scaling and then mouse control and then I’ll look at a first real milestone of creating the game’s scripted intro sequence as closely as possible to the 16 bit releases.
This work is now back on hold as I have to prioritise my own game development but this will be my little side-side-side project for the next few months at least…