Mystery House

Mystery House is a 1980 game for the Apple II by Roberta and Ken Williams. Although it had no sound, no color, and no animation, it did have one feature that would make it part of computer gaming history: graphics. This feature caused GamePro to name Mystery House the 51st most important game of all time, twenty-seven years after the game's release.^[1]

Designed throughout 1979, Mystery House was the first adventure game to ever contain graphics (70 simple two-dimensional drawings by Roberta Williams). Previously, adventure games were entirely text-based (this refers to story-based adventure games; computer role-playing games had been using graphics for several years by this point).

The game starts near an abandoned Victorian mansion. The player is soon locked inside the house with no other option than to explore. The mansion contains many interesting rooms and seven other people. Terrible events start happening and dead bodies begin appearing. It becomes obvious that there is a murderer on the loose in the house, and the player must discover who it is or become the next victim.

At the end of the 1970s, Ken Williams sought to set up a company for enterprise software for the market-dominating Apple II computer. One day, he took a teletype terminal to his residence to work on the development of an accounting program. Rummaging through a catalogue, he found a program called Colossal Cave Adventure. He and his wife Roberta both played it all the way through and their encounter with this game would have a strong influence on video-gaming history.

Having finished Colossal Cave Adventure, they began to search for something similar, but found the market underdeveloped. Roberta Williams liked the concept of a textual adventure very much, but she thought that the player would have a more satisfying experience with images and began to think of her own game. She thus conceived Mystery House, the first graphical adventure game, a detective story inspired by Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None.

Ken spent a few nights developing the game on his Apple II, and in the end they made packets with Ziploc bags containing the game's 5¼-inch disk and a photocopied paper describing the game. They sold it via a local software shop and to their great surprise, Mystery House was an enormous success. It quickly became a best-seller at a first-release price of USD$24.95. Eventually, it sold more than 10,000 copies, which was a record-breaking phenomenon for the time. Though Ken believed that the gaming market would be less of a growth market than the professional software market, he persevered with games. Thus, in 1980, the Williams' founded On-Line Systems, which would become Sierra On-Line in 1982.

In 1982, two years after its original release, Mystery House was re-released through the SierraVenture line, which produced a number of early Sierra games until 1983. It was also eventually released into the public domain.^[2]

• Elements from the game were reintroduced in The Colonel's Bequest.
• Mystery House was satirized in the adventure game Prisoner 2. One location was a spooky house, whereupon his arrival the player is told, "He's killed Ken!" and must seek absolution for murder.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Mystery House.

• The Dot Eaters entry profiling Mystery House and an early history of Sierra
• Mystery House Taken Over: remixes and parodies of the game by interactive fiction writers.
• Humorous review from a 2006 perspective.