Der Verlassene Planet

Der Verlassene Planet is an Austrian adventure for the Commodore 64, released in 1989 and written by Hannes Seifert. The name is worth remembering — Seifert went on to be one of the people who built an actual games industry in Austria, and this eight-bit release comes from the years when that work still happened on a kitchen table after hours.

A German-language adventure on the C64 implies specific things. You type commands, the text is in German, and parser vocabularies in smaller productions tend to be narrow, so progress often depends on hitting the exact phrasing the author had in mind. Any graphics are bound by a sixteen-colour palette and by the need to fit pictures and program logic into the memory the machine offered. Loading from disk or tape interrupts the pace in a way modern players have to consciously adjust to.

The title points to a science-fiction setting on an abandoned planet, but the details of the story and the puzzle chain are not documented, and this description will not invent them. No publisher is recorded, which for home-grown European software of this period usually means distribution through a magazine, a user group or the author's own arrangement.

The useful part: the game runs directly in the browser on OldGame.cz, so you can look at it without hunting down a disk image. Without German you will not get far, since every exchange happens through text.

As evidence of the Central European eight-bit scene, and of what a one-person adventure looked like, it is a genuinely interesting artefact. As an evening's entertainment it demands patience and a dictionary.