Adventure Gamers - Forums

At a time when Sierra and LucasArts were fiddling around with text parsers, other companies like ICOM Simulations were embracing the latest technologies and brought us Deja Vu: A Nightmare Comes True (1985), a graphical point and click game with an icon based (drag and drop) inventory which would become the default interface of the adventure genre for decades to come and which is still going strong today.

Tod Zipnick, the founder of ICOM, was my next door neighbor and a friend of my family back then and I first played an early alpha build of this game at his development studio some time late in 1984 I believe. The first time I sat down to play you couldn’t even leave the first room because a bug caused the game to crash if you tried.

ICOM was also one of the first companies to embrace the CDROM format and FMV with its Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective games in 1991. Sadly, that same year Tod lost his battle with Hodgkin’s lymphoma and died. He was only 35 years old.

Anyway, in the game you play a private detective who awakens in a bathroom with amnesia and who discovers a dead body and what appears to be the murder weapon in his possession. Are you the murderer? Are you being framed? You need to figure it all out before it’s too late.

That’s too bad about your friend.  He made some good games.

This was one of the very first adventure games I ever played (although it was the Nintendo version).

Really enjoyed it too.  The theme was much more up my alley than the more well known Shadowgate and Uninvited, though I liked them too.

Detective Mosely - 27 March 2014 08:00 AM

That’s too bad about your friend.  He made some good games.

He was actually good friends with my father, not with me personally. I was just a brat teenager at the time. He was a generous guy though. When he heard my Commodore 64 died he gave me a new one and a handful of games for it for free.

Bastich - 27 March 2014 12:52 AM

Anyway, in the game you play a private detective who awakens in a bathroom with amnesia and who discovers a dead body and what appears to be the murder weapon in his possession.

I really phrased this weird. It reads like it’s the bathroom that has amnesia and that the guy actually committed suicide.