Dark Convergence II

Year 1994, DOS, shareware on a floppy disk from a classmate. The title Dark Convergence II seemed mysterious to me back then — I didn't know how to translate the word "convergence," but it sounded serious and a bit dangerous, so I naturally fired up the disk.

Dark Convergence II is a text-graphic adventure by independent developer Jeff Kintz. It's a series set in a dark, presumably fantasy or sci-fi setting — I can't quite reconstruct the exact story now, but the title and release year suggest it was that typical low-budget indie project of the nineties, when one person with basic programming knowledge would invent a world, draw a few screens, and write a story that entertained them. The "II" in the title tells us there was a first installment, and that Kintz had enough drive to develop the series.

Controls were probably via parser or a simple menu — for shareware adventures of that era, a parser was the standard, though not always comfortable. This category of games lives and dies by how well the author guesses what the player will try to type. If Kintz was careful, the game worked. If not, you hit a wall of unrecognized commands and stared at the monitor feeling like the game simply hated you. With amateur titles from that time, it was fifty-fifty.

What I'm certain about from games of this type and period — the graphics were humble, but the ambition wasn't. The shareware market on DOS was full of people who wanted to make games like Sierra or Legend Entertainment, just without the budget and team. Results were uneven, but sometimes beneath that rough ore lay something with a real idea or atmosphere. Dark Convergence II belongs in the category of titles that went unwritten about in the mainstream, but a few players found it and today they're looking for it again precisely because they never found it anywhere else.

Today, this game is played mainly by those who enjoy hunting through old shareware for something the mainstream overlooked. Expect simple production, maybe some rough edges, but also an authentic artifact from the time when one person at a computer just made a game because it was fun. If you can stomach early-nineties adventures in their raw state, without modern conveniences and with patience for parsers, it's worth a try.