Jupiter Mission 1999

Jupiter Mission 1999 was released in 1983 for the Commodore 64 by The Avalon Hill Game Company. That publisher explains a lot. Avalon Hill was primarily a board and wargame house that moved into computer software early, bringing with it a habit of working with rules and long stretches of text rather than fast action.

The record lists a text-based presentation and a single player. 1983 was a strong year for text adventures, because written description sidestepped the biggest limitation of the hardware. A sentence can render a space station far more convincingly than eight coloured squares ever could.

The title points at an expedition to Jupiter set in 1999, which is to say the future as the early eighties pictured it. That kind of near-future fiction was standard science fiction at the time and has since become a genre of its own: stories about a period that has long passed and turned out completely differently.

Avalon Hill releases tended to be substantial, shipped with printed material, and assumed the player kept notes on paper. Drawing your own map in a notebook was simply part of playing games like this one.

Text had one practical advantage over graphics: it travelled between machines with far less effort. Artwork had to be redrawn for every computer according to what its display allowed, whereas a sentence remained a sentence wherever it ran. Publishers could therefore offer the same adventure across several platforms at once, with loading speed as the main difference between them.

Fancy visiting the 1999 that never happened? Jupiter Mission 1999 starts in the browser here on OldGame.cz.