Getting started with Scumm

When I look back to my childhood and remember my favourite games there is one that really springs to mind. The Secret of Monkey Island(tm). It's a shame that the point and click adventure has fallen out of favour with gamers and there are almost no large developers making new ones. The recent Sam and Max games by Telltale Games were excellent but I am not convinced by the episodic content. There were also very few characters and a lot of repetition of locations. I guess that in order to get my adventure game fix I am going to have to look back to the 1990s.

Unfortunately (for the adventure gamer) things have moved on since then. There have been a number of upgrades to Microsoft Windows, processors have gotten much MUCH faster and I have bought a Mac. A trip to Game or Gamestation is going to reward me with blank stares if I try and buy any of these classics as well. Luckily there are some resources out there that are going to make this all possible.

Firstly, eBay. The first step in playing any of the old games is going to be actually getting hold of a copy of them. A quick search on eBay and you should be able to find what you want. I expect that some people (if anyone is even reading this) are wondering why I don't just download them? You can get them for free from certain sites! Well, it's a bit of a legal gray area.

The idea with abandonware is that if a company is no longer distributing certain software then you won't be harming them by allowing people to download it. Whether you are harming the company or not isn't all that important. If you do not hold the correct license then you can't distribute other peoples intellectual property, whether they are distributing it themselves or not. Some companies are clamping down on abandonware. LucasArts and the Entertainment Software Association (along with others) are going to some length stop me from downloading old software. I'm not going to go into much more detail but you can find some resources for abandonware with a quick google if you want to learn more.

There are a couple of adventure games that have been released into the public domain that you can download and play for free! Beneath a Steel Sky and Flight of the Amazon Queen are both available to download from various sources.

The second thing that you will need is some way of actually playing the games. Most are not compatable with Windows XP or Mac OS X so you can't just run them directly from the CD (or diskette). You will need either an old PC capable of running DOS or other old Operating Systems or an interpreter such as ScummVM. I would recommend ScummVM, mostly because it is free and you won't have to clutter your office with old hardware. The ScummVM homepage contains downloads for Windows, Linux, Mac OS, Nintendo DS, PS2 etc. so your hardware platform of choice is not a problem. This is excellent news for a Power PC Mac owner such as myself.

Setting up ScummVM depends on your machine so you should just follow the instructions on the website. As previously mentioned you can downloadBeneath a Steel Sky or Flight of the Amazon Queen to test that everything is working correctly.