The Evolution Of: Questprobe

uestprobe was hugely ambitious. Not from Marvel’s perspective, 12 comic books over four years was nothing for a firm that by 1983 was publishing upwards of 40 titles a month. However, each Questprobe title was to be continued in a computer game, and so Marvel offered this daunting task to the highly prolific Scott Adams, whose company Adventure International had introduced text adventures to home computers in 1978 despite being told that it would be impossible due to the format’s lack of memory. AI then spent the following five years developing numerous adventures for countless home systems, which, as Scott explains, put the firm in the perfect position to meet Marvel’s demanding schedule. “Adventure International was contacted by the VP at Marvel, Joe Calamari,” Scott remembers. “He said he wanted to get Marvel comics licensed into the home computer game market, and that everyone he had talked to recommended Adventure International. After that, I went to Marvel’s Manhattan offices, and I met with Joe and Marvel’s chief editor Jim Shooter, and we worked out some of the preliminaries of what we would be doing. Marvel gave AI complete carte blanche on design, with its only requirement being that it would vet the art in the games to make sure that it conformed to

Marvel’s standards.”

The design for

Questprobe would involve Marvel’s heroes encountering an otherworldly but also somewhat familiar-looking character in the comics – the Chief Examiner, who would then transfer their likenesses into Scott’s games. “The entire Questprobe concept was something that I developed,” Scott notes. “I wrote the storylines, plotted them and outlined the ideas, and then Marvel’s John Byrne and others took them and created the comic books. My desire was that the comics and the games needed to be tied together, so that each would stand on their own, but to get the full story the comic book would have to be read and the game would have to be played. The art for the Chief Examiner was done by Marvel based on photos of me, and it was kind of fun appearing in cameo form in the books!”

Eyebrows were raised, however, when Scott’s first pick for Questprobe was far from Marvel’s bestselling character, so why exactly did the developer choose the Hulk? “I got the same question from Marvel!” Scott grins. “My reason for picking Hulk first was that I wanted to work my way into the Questprobe project, as I felt that the first game wasn’t going to be as refined as the later ones.

Also, I was working on an extended engine that could handle more than two-word sentences and could even provide some animation in the graphic versions, and it wasn’t ready in time for The Hulk.”

It’s arguable that those new to text adventures wouldn’t be ready for The Hulk either, as its first challenge saw Bruce Banner tied to a chair, with the command to ‘Hulk-out’ being far from obvious. “The idea of the chair was to get the player used to the idea that they had to solve puzzles to proceed through the story,” Scott explains. “And before there could be a Hulk there had to be a Bruce Banner. I didn’t want players to spend a lot of time as Bruce, so I needed to put up a situation where they could very quickly convert into the Hulk without having to do much with Bruce. He was also