
Remembering 'Portal,' Activision's Interactive Novel - infodroid
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/aekvv8/activisions-Twine-Like-interactive-novel
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microcolonel
> _Remembering 'Portal,' Activision's..._

Aside: After programming, I can not bring myself to place separating
punctuation inside quotation marks. It seems entirely wrong to place
characters within the quotation when they clearly come from without.

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mlevental
I have never understood that, and consequently never placed punctuation within
quotes.

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DerekL
> Using a rather Windows-like, icon-based interface (impressive in the
> mid-80s), you moved a cursor around the screen to select from database
> categories like Geographical, History, Medical, Military, PsiLink, and
> SciTech.

From the screen shots, it looks like the game uses the normal Amiga graphical
interface. I wonder if the author even knows what an Amiga was, or maybe he
knows about games on the Amiga, but he doesn't realize that applications on
the Amiga used a GUI.

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jhbadger
It looked exactly the same on the Apple ][. And I'm not talking about the Mac-
like IIgs -- I'm talking about the actual 8-bit Apples. It was impressive to
see GUIs on machines like that.

As for the game, I liked the story, but there really wasn't any gameplay as
such -- you merely uncovered more of the story by clicking around. In a way,
it reminded me of Pavic's "Dictionary of the Khazars" in that it was a non-
linear narrative told in pieces that the reader had to put together into a
coherent narrative.

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jmcgough
Would love to experience it myself. What's the best way to play it now -
dosbox?

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spectral_gap
The game is playable at the Internet Archive:
[https://archive.org/details/msdos_Portal_1986](https://archive.org/details/msdos_Portal_1986)

