Arazok’s Tomb (Macintosh)

Arazok’s Tomb (Macintosh)

Arazok's Tomb is a relatively obscure adventure for the Amiga and Macintosh that was published by Aegis Development in 1987. Aegis Development was a relatively obscure publisher that only published a handful of mostly equally obscure games. Arazok's Tomb is basically a text adventure game with some static and animated graphics, a drop down menu, and even some basic speech synthesis tacked on. It seems odd to me that a game like this was limited to the Macintosh and Amiga as it is something that 8-bit computers with a larger market share like the Commodore 64 could have easily handled. While on the surface, the addition of graphics and a drop down menu make it seem more sophisticated than traditional text adventure games like Infocom's Zork, in reality Arazok's Tomb's text parser was less sophisticated with a smaller vocabulary. I suppose they were trying to capitalize on the popularity of these newer machines by being among the first publishers. It doesn't seem to have worked out too well for them. Arazok's Tomb is a sort of horror mystery game. You play the role of an investigative reporter whose Uncle and archaeologist friend have gone missing while excavating a tomb in Scotland. Your job is to find out what happened to them. It's only a medicore game when it comes to text adventures but for fans of the genre it's a at least something a little different. The ad above from 1986 is for the Macintosh version of the game while the screen shots are from the Amiga version. The Macintosh version would have been limited to black and white graphics. If you want to play this game you'll have to track down some original hardware and software. Otherwise, emulation is your friend.