The Prisoner

The Good
It is what would be considered an adventure game. I think I spent about 3 months to solve it, playing a couple of hours a day (I don't remember exactly). I got my Apple II+ back in 1981 and Prisoner was among the very first games I played on that computer. I was familiar with the British series Prisoner, which I found fascinating, as well as I found this computer game. It was weird, it was almost "hallucinogenic" in an intellectual way (not REALLY hallucinogenic).

But what finally blew me away was the solution, when I finally won the game. The solution became a psychological message for the rest of my life (and still is). It is now 2011, here I am 30 years later, played great many other games, with magnitudes higher technology, graphics, sound, you name it, included, yet I still never found a game which left such a deep and lifelong impression in my mind.

Too bad that nobody will remake The Prisoner with today's computer technology. It would make perhaps one of the most fascinating game ever.

The Bad
Well.....back then I liked everything. Looking back from three decades distance, obviously by today's standards the graphics, the sound, pretty much everything is (was) primitive, but let's not forget that we are talking about the Apple II computer which had 48 K (not GB, not even MB) RAM memory with a barely more than 1 Mhz CPU. 48 K is one-one millionth of 4.8 Gig. Think about that. The entire game fit on a 135K floppy disk. Again, one could fit that game one million times on a 4.8 Gig memory chip. Yet, it gave me 3 month worth of fascinating game play and an ending which I will never, ever forget. Geez.....I just realized I should be listing what I didn't like about this game. For real, there is nothing I didn't like about this game when I played it.

The Bottom Line
An unparalleled brilliant creation.
Too bad that now, 30 years later, I seriously doubt that there are enough intelligent people who would have the patience to play this game through. Really too bad, because a really brainy person could still enjoy it very much.