Main Frame

Main Frame is a 1988 Commodore 64 title credited in our catalogue to MicroIllusions and recorded as text-based and single-player. The name points at mainframe computers, the room-sized machines still doing everyday work in companies and government offices throughout the eighties.

A text-based interface meant, in practice, a game of reading and typing. The program describes the situation, the player enters a command, the state advances. On the Commodore 64 this was an economical way to deliver substantial content, since text occupies a fraction of the memory that pictures demand — the same disk could hold a far longer story or a more elaborate simulation.

The year sits at a turning point. Text games on home computers were giving way to graphical adventures, and the eight-bit machines were approaching the end of their commercial life, even though the Commodore 64 kept selling well past that point. Text titles from 1988 are therefore late representatives of their form rather than typical ones.

MicroIllusions was an American company active in the second half of the eighties, working mainly with Amiga and Commodore machines. Our record adds nothing further, and nothing further is asserted here without a verified source.

Mainframes were a favourite subject in the popular culture of the time. They represented power locked behind a glass wall, and a terminal meant access to information nobody else could see. A text game was the ideal form for that theme, since it uses the very interface it describes.

Good news for the curious: this one starts right inside your browser on OldGame.cz, so a 1988 text game is only a couple of clicks away.