Back in 1985, Transylvania was a popular adventure game written by Antonio Antiochia and published by Penguin Software. Henning Stams, a fan of the game, wanted a version in his native German language and created one! He dubbed the conversion “Transsylvanien: Ein Spannendes High-Resolution-Spiel” (a fascinating high-resolution game).
Previously, I wrote about the Transsylvanien 5.25″ disk that I recovered in 2019, courtesy of Mark Pelczarski (Penguin Software president) who gave me a box of his disks to recover. Some of that is featured on our “Penguin Software / Polarware Unpublished Archives” page: www.callapple.org/penguin.
Recently, Mark found and scanned Henning’s original German documentation, that was mailed to him in 1986, including: a command list, description of the command structure, and tips on how to play the game. There’s also a map of 16 areas that is Henning’s artwork. Henning’s Transsylvanien 5.25″ disk images and PDF documentation are available here. When I asked Henning about the inspiration and background for his project, he said:
“Back in the early 1980s, I was a big fan of ‘picture enhanced text adventures,’ being fascinated by such games ever since Mystery House, which I played day and night in 1981. I came across Transylvania in 1982 and just loved it. In 1983, during my two-year service at the German Navy, I had plenty of time in the evenings and decided to attempt a translation of the fantastic game – just for fun. I remember one of the challenges with translating Transylvania was that I had no source code / development system / instructions, so I did it all via a disk editor, just overwriting the English phrases and setting the right termination points as most German words are longer than their English counterparts. I still had to use the space available, finding out how the parser works, where the 1-letter commands were hidden, etc. Numerous times, I made the program malfunction and had to start all over. By the end of the year, however, the translation was complete. I enjoyed playing it a couple of times and made several of my friends play it as it was the only German adventure game back then. The whole thing sat there for a while (I started my studies in 1984), but later on I thought I could as well contact Penguin Software and shoot for an official version / new translation. So I created documentation, of which some pieces were found among a letter I wrote to Mark Pelczarski in 1986. At that time, however, a new version based on Comprehend was already released, so the existing translation could not be used anymore. However, also in 1986, Penguin Software / Polarware faced some commercial challenges, so the project was never pursued any further. So the translation of the early 2-word parser version of Transylvania is the only version that exists. If anyone still wants to play it, I want to say, ‘Viel Spaß damit – rette Sabrina!'”
