Computer theatre: raising the curtain on a visual novel prototype

Abstract

The year 1984 was the setting of Orwell’s dystopian novel as well as the year the Apple Macintosh debuted with its legendary Super Bowl advertisement. It was also the year following the video game crash of 1983. Much has been written about the macro view of the event, of companies caught up in—and consumed by—this crash, yet very little captures the toll that the crash took on people working in the video game industry at the time. For these individuals, it would have been little consolation that this crash was not a global phenomenon or that it was not even the first market crash in the video game industry. This is the backdrop for the story of how two game-industry veterans found themselves in 1984 creating a prototype of what would now be called a visual novel.