Silverwolf
by St. Bride's School
Released: late 1991 or early 1992
Language: PAW (Professional Adventure Writer)
Platform: ZX Spectrum It was an o

1992: Silverwolf - 50 Years of Text Games

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2021-06-12 07:00:04

Silverwolf by St. Bride's School Released: late 1991 or early 1992 Language: PAW (Professional Adventure Writer) Platform: ZX Spectrum

It was an odd advert for a computer magazine. Next to a sketch of a provocatively posed, long-legged young woman in stockings—okay, maybe that part wasn’t so odd—its copy hyped not a new piece of hardware, but a house in Ireland:

the famous school where grown-up girls are transformed into schoolgirls. ...Now you can find out for yourself as you guide Trixie Trinian through the classrooms, corridors and secret places of the strangest school ever—to uncover

“Not so much a programme more a way of life,” the text below helpfully clarified. While not entirely apparent, this was an ad for an adventure game. Sending £5.95 to “St. Bride’s School, Burtonport, County Donegal, Ireland” would get you a cassette tape for your Spectrum 48K containing a text adventure written, according to its label, by “the Games Mistresses.”

At the address was “a white crumbling turn-of-the-century house overlooking the tiny fishing village of Burtonport,” where women could take a paid holiday that would immerse them in the life of a proper boarding school girl of an earlier time. “There were no electric lights in the place,” one game journalist wrote upon visiting: “the maid who answered the door was surely not of this decade.” The students wore bonnets and period clothes while attending lessons on mathematics, literature, and penmanship; plastic and other modern materials were forbidden; the headmistress was a severe woman in black who enforced strict discipline—stricter, at times, than some of the students might have preferred. “Quite where computers fit into this situation is difficult to understand,” another journalist wrote; and nobody could really put their finger on what the “situation” even was. Were the group “Victorian cultists?” Were they LARPers? Were they con artists preying on emotionally immature women? Were they a game studio with a very unusual front? Or was there, as one embarrassed Irish reporter asked, “almost a gay element to the activities here?” Answers were not then forthcoming. Few are even today.

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