Wait... I just searched again. I'm not crazy. It was called HBBS and it got added to archive.org last year:
https://archive.org/details/apple2_hbbs
Oh, no, its author (Matthew Dornquast) passed away earlier this year:
https://www.startribune.com/obituaries/detail/0000416768/
Jason Scott (textfiles.com) posted about his passing at the time:
https://nitter.net/textfiles/status/1490157005805395971
Well, now I'm bummed. I found what I was looking for all these years and sadly learned its author died much too young.
:-(
I'll give it a shot. In the late 80s, my dad bought an 8088 XT clone and "somehow" got some games. We had a bunch of the popular Sierra/AGI adventure games, Hugo's House of Horrors, etc. This game was in the same vein, but way way more primitive.
It's a DOS game. I believe it would have been made between 1980 and 1988. I remember it as a text adventure, but with non-interactive full-screen graphics (e.g. appears like Sierra games, but you can't move the player, only issue text commands). I remember it as monochrome (bright white on dark black background) despite my computer supporting at least CGA. I remember the commands you type being entirely in uppercase (LOOK DOOR, PRESS BUTTON). I remember the protagonist waking up on an alien spaceship, and by far the strongest memory I remember is there being an elevator with up and down buttons you could press to go to different floors of the spaceship. I vaguely remember the game being called ALIEN (as in, I could type ALIEN to start it; so, ALIEN.COM maybe??)
I don't expect to ever figure this out, and have mostly gaslit myself about this ever existing. I actually asked /r/tipofmytongue or some similar subreddit about 10 years ago to no avail. If anyone on hacker news has any clues to help with this I would be so grateful and would buy you a beverage.
p.s. @nebula8804, my guess for your holy grail is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blade_Runner_(1997_video_game)
Or perhaps "The Eternal Dagger", which has a necromancer's cave: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/appleii/577550-the-eternal-dag...
I can’t find any evidence it was a port of an earlier DOS game though.
This helps narrow it down so much appreciated for the suggestion.
OFC they may know it because, doh, they are reimplementing engines since forever.
E.g. there are games that I couldn’t remember, one was a quest(?) in a set of pictures and a submarine, dark tones, mysterious. I remember a full outside view of it and then few screens inside.
Another was a dos game that had a fullscreen map of some galaxy and a cursor in a form of a torn hand. Five blobs below the map were unnamed(?) buttons on a strange panel. One button sent you flying through a “canyon” on a selected planet, which was drawn as a set of simple \_/ planes slightly offset from each other, synthwave style-ish but much simpler. I believe it was an early rogue like, but I was too young and knew no english to understand it.
I don’t get how one can remember something but not have any details except a period of release.
Check out the map around 15:00 and the planet landing around 16:21.
See my comment here for more info: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33258294
Thanks for the suggestion though!
Commander Blood: https://youtu.be/e9nOYM6nSXo?t=39
With an intro like that I could NEVER forget this one. That and the fact that this game did not crash constantly like my missing game did lol.
Too bad it didn't sell well, those French dev create the most unique stuff but sometimes it is too unique for the mainstream.
Off to listen to Oxygène.
Honestly I cannot remember scenes correctly. It was super unique to me at the time but the constant crashes prevented me from playing it throughly even though it remained in my mind.
Another thing I can add was that there was FMV scenes with humans I think. I also think there were cyberpunk elements but not sure. I specifically chose the above CGI image because it reminds me of the game.
When I say point and click I mean a game like how Myst operates.
My hope is that if I ever find it, with my tech skills that I didn't have as a kid, I can hopefully repair the game so it does not crash(or at least research if someone else has fixed it)
EDIT: Others have kindly gotten me to think of more details of this game. I am collecting them here:
1) The game shipped on a CD, I think the CD had a lot of "Blue" on it. As in the label had a lot of the color Blue. Sorry, I'm trying to dig deep into my head as much as I can.
2) The game was a point and click in the style of Myst. Specifically pre-rendered CGI Images where you would click to progress through the level. Occasional FMVs with real humans would appear.
3) It has a similar setting to Blade Runner (1997): https://youtu.be/9KSqIDxtB4U?t=2427 but again the game didn't operate like Blade Runner, it operated like Myst.
4) This was definitely some sort of Win32 application (ie. runs on Windows 95/98 and not DOS) and so the graphics imitate a game like Myst and not those old VGA DOS games.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Point-and-click_adven...
Some useful information would be: When is the earliest date you remember playing it? Or, when is a date where you are positive the game had been made at that point?
What did the graphics look like? Do you remember anything about any intros or loading screens?
Anything more specific than sci-fi? Space? Aliens? Was it dark/scary, light-hearted, dramatic, etc?
Do you remember any lines, characters, game mechanics, or plot points from it?
Certainly tedious, but maybe your best bet, with such a vague description.
[1]:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33258294
While all those games are from the 90s. I must stress that this was definitely a Win32 game: ie. Has to run on Windows 9x and cannot run on DOS.
[1]:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33258294
The game was definitely a Win32 application so it wouldn't have the style of "The Dig"