Apple II Bits

Avengers: Infinity War, now playing in theaters, is the 19th movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, tying together nine film franchises: Iron Man, Hulk, Captain America, Thor, Doctor Strange, Ant-Man, Guardians of the Galaxy, Spider-Man, and Black Panther. These characters have decades of comic book history dating back to 1962, with some of them seeing their first live-action interpretations only now.

But many of them have appeared in other media as well — and that includes Apple II games. Kat Bailey at USGamer has compiled the video game history of every major hero in Avengers: Infinity War. The Apple II gets a special shout-out for being the first video game to ever feature The Incredible Hulk:

Hulk is known as the unstoppable force of destruction, but his first video game appearance was in… an adventure game? Yep, Hulk’s video game debut was in 1984’s Questprobe, a trilogy of command-based adventure games for the Apple II and Commodore 64 [also] featuring Spider-Man, The Human Torch, and The Thing. It had fantastic art for its time, but the graphical splendor resulted in severely limited commands, hurting overall gameplay.

MobyGames offers this plot summary:

1st in the Questprobe Marvel Comics series. Play Bruce Banner and the Incredible Hulk through this interactive fiction game with graphics. You awake as Banner, tied by ropes to your chair in a bunker in the desert; once you free yourself, collect all the gems to escape this hellhole.

These games were designed by Scott Adams, author of many classic Apple II text adventures. However, The Hulk was the first in the Questprobe series, with the sequels using a much-improved game engine; as a result, Hulk may not have been Adams’ finest hour.

Although Avengers is tearing up the box office, the Hulk didn’t similarly smash his way to success in his Apple II outing: Questprobe, originally planned to be a series of a dozen games, was cancelled after the third title when its developer went bankrupt. Such was the case for many text-adventure publishers of that era, as more processing power became available and gamers migrated to more visual genres of entertainment.

A greater loss than Hulk’s defeat at retail is his disappearance from history: my initial search in the Internet Archive revealed many playable copies of Questprobe, but only for the Spectrum ZX and Atari 800 computers; the Apple II version was surprisingly absent.

Surely that floppy disk isn’t rarer than an Infinity Stone. If the Avengers can come together to save the day, we can do our part to preserve the Hulk! Fortunately, all it took was a tweet aimed at the right persons:

https://twitter.com/kgagne/status/991523942237200385

pic.twitter.com/PedcVV36X6

— @a2_4am@mastodon.social (@a2_4am) May 3, 2018

… and the game is now available.

Hulk was NOT slain by Thanos, for the good of the Universe. Phew!

Summer blockbuster season is here, as heralded by last week’s release of The Avengers: Age of Ultron. Comic-book superheroes will be smashing across the screen all summer, with the likes of Ant-Man and The Fantastic Four soon to follow.

Many of these characters are the creation of Stan Lee, who has played as much a role in the development of the comic book medium as Steve Wozniak has in the creation of the personal computer. If Thor, Iron Man, Captain America, and the Hulk can team up, why can’t these legends?

Geeks need wait only a year for that union to occur when Woz and Lee combine forces to bring us Silicon Valley Comic Con 2016.

Says Woz:

I want to give Silicon Valley it’s very own kind of Comic Con where everyone can have fun enjoying what they love. Today we’re lucky to have so many kinds of entertainment, from movies, TV shows, web series, music, video games, social media and more, and the lines between entertainment and the technology we love so much in Silicon Valley are getting blurrier every day. We’re going to create a place where all these different kinds of interests can come together, and we can come together too.

The event will be held March 19–20, 2016, in San Jose, California — home to the Children’s Discovery Museum that Woz founded. Although tickets are not yet on sale, you can register to receive information for attendees, exhibitors, or media.

The creators of Spider-Man and the Apple II will make an awesome team. Who knows what fun their fans will have at the inaugural Silicon Valley Comic Con!

(Hat tip to Conviron Altatis)