1989-1990 Rainbird
Platforms: IBM PC, Atari ST, Commodore Amiga
The Acrobat is an intriguing unreleased adventure game, developed by Simon Price and Mike Lewis as a 16-bit evolution of the comics-based adventure system previously used for the likes of Red Hawk and Kwah!
The preservation of The Acrobat has been in collaboration with Richard Hewison as part of the launch of Richard’s new Memories of Rainbird and Beyond Software book Kickstarter, following on from his superb Firebird book. If you love gaming history and preservation, please take a look and consider supporting it:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/zzap642021annual/memories-of-rainbird-and-beyond-software
The game starred Alek, an acrobat performing in a cosmic circus. Things quickly take a turn for the worse when the circus comes under attack, with Alek captured and imprisoned alongside a clown. It soon becomes apparent that the clown is actually an android – and by dismantling it and making use of its components, players could engineer an escape and begin a much larger adventure involving political intrigue, resistance movements and computer terminals that revealed additional information as the story progressed.
Powering the game was The Biro, an adventure engine developed by Trevor Toms, previously known for his work at RamJam Corporation on titles such as Valkyrie 17 and The Terrors of Trantoss. Trevor and Mike Lewis had enhanced the system for a variety of projects, including The Hound of Shadow for Electronic Arts, and The Acrobat was perhaps one of its most ambitious uses.
The game’s biggest innovation was its presentation. Rather than displaying a traditional adventure game screen, players effectively created and read a comic book as they played. The screen was divided into comic panels, with new panels added as actions were performed. Clicking on objects brought up context sensitive icon menus, allowing actions such as examining, opening, talking or picking items up. A separate menu handled movement and other commands.
Graphics were created by Carl Cropley, with Mike Lewis assembling scenes using a proprietary editor. Scenes were built from linked lists of graphical elements, allowing objects to be layered, moved and manipulated with relative ease. The engine could also render scenes at different scales to create varying viewing distances.
Conversations switched to a dedicated “talking heads” view, with the player able to type questions and interact directly with characters. The comic book concept was taken even further by allowing players to flick back through previously generated pages, recreating earlier scenes exactly as they had originally appeared.
The PC version supported an impressive range of display hardware for the time, including VGA, EGA, CGA, IBM PC Jr and Hercules graphics modes. An Atari ST development version was also produced, whilst work began on an Amiga conversion after Firebird and Rainbird were acquired by MicroProse.
Sadly, the project would never make it to release. Following evaluation by MicroProse, the game was cancelled before completion. The Acrobat would also mark the end of Mike Lewis’ game development career. After another project, Halo Jones, also failed to reach release following the collapse of publisher Piranha, Mike moved away from commercial game development and into other software work.
Thanks to Richard and Mike, we’re able to share what remains of the game – including all of the source code.
To run the game successfully under modern systems, Richard found that DOSBox-X was considerably more stable when configured to emulate a modest late 1980s PC environment. Recommended settings include 2MB of RAM (memsize=2), standard VGA graphics (machine=vgaonly), pixel-perfect OpenGL rendering (output=openglpp), automatic CPU speed management (cycles=auto), and a Sound Blaster 16 (sbtype=sb16).
Richard noted that The Acrobat was developed around 1989 when 286 machines were still common and 386 systems represented the high end of the market, meaning modern DOSBox-X defaults may provide a substantially different environment than the game originally expected. In particular, avoiding large amounts of emulated memory and more advanced hardware appears to improve stability. Using these settings, the game progresses beyond the title screen and into playable territory, although some mouse flickering remains.
Based on Richard’s notes, there is at least a partial solution to The Acrobat in its current state. Richard recalls that the player must dismantle the clown robot while imprisoned in the opening cell and then use the recovered electronics on the cell door to escape. He also remembers accessing a computer system elsewhere in the game, although he is unsure whether that was in this specific development version or another build he explored many years ago. As the surviving version appears unfinished, it is unclear how much content exists beyond the initial escape sequence, but Richard’s guidance provides a useful starting point for anyone wishing to investigate further.
Whilst the concept was certainly innovative, it was felt that the game in many ways was like having an 8-bit design philosophy stretched onto 16-bit hardware. Thanks to the PC prototype made available via Richard, we’re able to see a fascinating glimpse of this title.
With thanks to Richard Hewison for highlighting the game and providing the background information for this article.
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