Gerbil Riot of '67
Description
Owing more than a little to Robert Arnstein's TRS-80 escape-from-the-asylum text adventure classic Bedlam, this whimsical romp casts the player as an inmate with second ideas about remaining inside the institution walls. It's not such a strange place, halls and stairways, but to make up for it the nuthouse is packed with a host of peculiar one-personality-trait characters (some of them the staff!), each of whom neatly play one-off roles in simple, if occasionally arbitrary puzzles.
While there are no gerbils to be found on the grounds (their riot is firmly in the background; your part in it is why you were incarcerated), you will conduct a meaningful exchange with a squirrel demanding an object-combination puzzle the likes of which wouldn't become standard until the days of the graphical adventure game.
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4 People (3 developers, 1 thanks)
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Average score: 80% (based on 1 ratings)
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Trivia
Development
Way back in 1983, writer Paul Harrison challenged the readers of Dragon User magazine to write more interesting text adventure games with more interesting names. The Gerbil Riot of '67 was among these, and some five years later, long after any sane person would have forgotten such a morsel of trivia, Simon Avery took him up on it.
In the documentation to the TADS release, Simon reports: "I have never met Paul Harrison, but I would like to, if only to ask him about the title. He must be a very unique individual."
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Related Sites +
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Gerbil Riot @ Baf's Guide to the IF Archive
Free, legal download of three versions of the game.
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Contributors to this Entry
Game added by Pseudo_Intellectual.
Commodore 64 added by FatherJack.
Additional contributors: formercontrib, Patrick Bregger.
Game added August 15, 2006. Last modified February 22, 2023.