Simon the Sorcerer

About Simon the Sorcerer

Simon the Sorcerer (1993) is Adventure Soft's comic point-and-click adventure in which a sarcastic 12-year-old is pulled into a fairy-tale world to rescue a wizard, a very British answer to Monkey Island later voiced by Red Dwarf's Chris Barrie.

Simon the Sorcerer in Depth

On his 12th birthday, Simon is given a dog, Chippy, which his parents had found wrapped in paper on the doorstep with an unreadable book. When Chippy drags the book out of the loft, Simon reads "Ye Olde Spellbooke" aloud, opening a portal that sends both of them into a world of magic and monsters, where Simon finds himself in a wizard's robe. A letter from the wizard Calypso explains that he summoned Simon to help defeat the evil sorcerer Sordid, but Calypso has since been kidnapped. Simon gets the village pub's wizards to make him one of them, shrinks himself to break into Sordid's lair, and finally pushes Sordid into the Fiery Pits of Rondor after destroying his petrifying wand. The world parodies fantasy and fairy tales, from Rapunzel, Jack and the Beanstalk and the Three Billy Goats Gruff to The Lord of the Rings, Narnia and Discworld.

Players steer Simon with the mouse, using verb commands such as "Look at", "Talk to" and "Give" on objects and characters and storing items in an inventory. A postcard in the inventory handles saving and loading, and a map provides fast travel until a certain point in the story.

Making Simon the Sorcerer

Director and producer Mike Woodroffe saw a market for comic adventures in the success of Monkey Island 2, and his son Simon wrote the script, drawing on Terry Pratchett, Red Dwarf, Fawlty Towers and Monty Python and deliberately aiming for British humour to set it apart; Pratchett chose not to be involved. A team of 15 built it, with Woodroffe and technical director Alan Brigman creating the AGOS II engine, which turned mouse actions into text commands, and art by a Newcastle team led by Paul Drummond. It was released on floppy disk in 1993 for the Amiga and PC, then on CD32 and PC CD-ROM in 1994 with Barrie, whom Woodroffe had in mind when writing, voicing Simon. Activision published it in the US. It was acclaimed for its humour and visuals, with some criticism of its controls and linearity, and sold over 600,000 copies by September 1999. Computer Gaming World praised its "tasty puzzles" and humour "turned up to the max", and Adventure Gamers ranked it 44th among adventure games in 2011. Simon the Sorcerer II followed in 1995.