Fame Quest

Fame Quest was published for the Commodore 64 by Braingames in 1984, and despite the title it is not a game about show business. Fame here means renown in the medieval sense: you play the lowest rank of knight who must earn enough of it to be admitted to the Royal Court.

In practice that means a conventional adventure game in a fantasy setting. You leave a castle, head out into the land, talk to the locals, help them with what they need, and fight wizards, dragons and other creatures. Progress is measured in knightly grades and the goal is to reach grade twenty — a fairly ambitious structure for a game from 1984.

The screen layout is interesting. It is not one large window but five blocks: one at the top, three in the middle and one at the bottom. Each displays a different category of information, so the scene, your character's state and the text output are all visible at once. It was a practical solution for a machine that could afford neither scrolling text nor full-screen redraws.

The weaknesses are exactly what you would expect from an early-eighties adventure. Descriptions are terse, the game gives no feedback about whether you are heading the right way, and progress leans heavily on taking notes. The graphics are simple even by the standards of the day.

Braingames was a small British outfit with a short catalogue and Fame Quest is one of the few titles it left behind. Today it is more a record of how larger games were built on an 8-bit machine in 1984 than something you would hand to a friend for an evening.