Mystery House (1980)
Mystery House is a 1980 adventure video game made by Sierra On-Line and StarCraft.
Mystery House, built by Roberta and Ken Williams in 1980, is the first graphic adventure game ever sold. It paired a typed text parser with simple hand-drawn line art and sent players into a haunted Victorian mansion where a group of guests is murdered one by one. You explore its rooms, gather items and work out who the killer is, setting the template every illustrated adventure would follow.
Quick answers
What is Mystery House about?
Mystery House, built by Roberta and Ken Williams in 1980, is the first graphic adventure game ever sold. It paired a typed text parser with simple hand-drawn line art and sent players into a haunted Victorian mansion where a group of guests is murdered one by one. You explore its rooms, gather items and work out who the killer is, setting the template every illustrated adventure would follow.
When was Mystery House released?
Mystery House was released on 5 May 1980.
Who made Mystery House?
Mystery House was made by Sierra On-Line and StarCraft.
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A few thoughts on Mystery House
This is the literal start of the genre, worth playing for the history as much as the puzzles. From here Roberta Williams built the fairy-tale worlds of King's Quest I and returned to the murder-in-a-mansion idea, far more lavishly, in The Colonel's Bequest.
The dawn of the graphic adventure
Mystery House is where illustrated adventure games begin. These early Sierra classics show the form growing up fast, from the first fairy-tale quests to comedy sci-fi and the parser games that followed the mansion murders.
Whodunits and haunted houses
Mystery House traps you in a mansion with a hidden killer picking off the guests. These Sierra mysteries and horrors carry the same dread of a house with something wrong inside, from Laura Bow's murder cases to Roberta Williams' later full-motion shocker.