Pleroma

Pleroma

Next up in my #macicons series, let's look at Deja Vu: A Nightmare Comes True (1985). It was arguably (though perhas not technically) the first point-and-click adventure game and the first title in the #macventure series (that includes the more popular Shadowgate).

ICOM's concept was to make a game version of a 1960s pulp novel, with gritty characters and noir vibes and a cynical, dry-humoured narrator. I think the icon nails that perfectly.
The icon for classic Mac game Deja Vu: A Nightmare Comes True. It's a 32x32 pixel 1-bit black-and-white illustration (that I've blown up to a larger size) of a man who looks like he's been lifted straight out of a mid-20th-century crime drama — beard stubble, cigarette, hat tipped over one eye, scar over the other eye, and directional lighting that puts him partly in shadow.
replies
1
announces
3
likes
11

@MossRC Absolutely love the UI for interacting with containers in that game. It's so weird, it feels like a joke when you reload your gun by dragging and dropping bullets into your gun folder.

But I'd put Enchanted Scepters down as an earlier point and click adventure?

@plauk I think it's a shame we've never seen much exploration of that nested inventory idea. Another version with the kinks and quirks smoothed out would be really interesting.

As for Enchanted Scepters being a point-and-click adventure, it comes down to semantics. It's rare that there are actually any clickable objects in the illustrated scenes, but you can of course use the mouse to operate all the menus and select commands. (Many later World Builder games included lots of clickable objects and hotspots, though.) Whereas most people would probably think of "point and click" meaning that you can use the mouse to directly interact with objects in a scene. Hence why I called Deja Vu "arguably" the first.

@MossRC Yeah. I guess, all world builder games were a bit of a hybrid. As a kid I definitely thought of them as point and click.