Archivists have uncovered a prototype of a lost Commodore 64 "visual novel" from the co-creator of Centipede Dona Bailey.
The game, which is called Computer Theatre, was found in the collection of Paul Allen Newel (one of the designers of Simutrek's laserdisc game Cube Quest) and was reportedly a collaboration between Newel and Bailey, while both were at Activision in 1984. Had it been released, according to the French publication Le-Monde, it would have seen players choose between three characters – Cathy, Beth, and Kent — before letting them experience an interactive loosely autobiographical story, where they could interact with NPCs, pick dialogue options, and read newspaper clippings.
The prototype was discovered by Katie Biittner, an anthropologist at MacEwan University, in Alberta, Canada, who was recently given access to Newel's garage for a research project and will soon be the subject of an extensive article this December, published in the specialized journal ROMchip.
According to a Facebook post from Carl Thierren, a professor of video game history at the University of Montreal who was asked to evaluate the prototype, the article will feature insights from himself, Biitner, Newel, and Bailey, as well as John Aycock — a professor in computer science at the University of Calgary who helped get the prototype up and running.
In the very same post, Thierren also wrote the following (as translated by Google), giving us a little more insight into why he considers the find to be so significant:
"This is a visual novel (VN) "before the letter", imagined by Dona and Paul, at a time when this genre also emerged in Japan. It's so beautiful we decided to make it a collective article with ten hands: the archaeologist, the computer scientist, the 'fake' historian, the programmer, and the designer (after all, it will be the world premiere of their work, forty years later).
"I imagine that this kind of research is particularly appealing to 'geeks' like us (level 60+), but it actually seems of interest to the world (literally: see the Le Monde newspaper article 'How archaeologists found Dona Bailey's lost game')."
You can visit the Le Monde article to see an image of an early version of the game called Holding Things Together being played in the C64 emulator Vice.