Telarium

History

C. David Seuss founded Trillium Corporation as a subsidiary of Spinnaker Software, the company that he was already the CEO and founder of. Within the first year of its foundation the original name, Trillium, was changed to Telarium due to legal issues presented by a book publisher. Telarium exclusively released adventure games with the exception of Shadowkeep, which was a role-playing game. The games were based on books, and the development of each game led to cooperation between the software developers and the authors. The first author who was consulted was the famous science fiction novelist, Michael Crichton, who collaborated on the development of Telarium's Amazon game, which was loosely based on Crichton's book Congo.

Adventure games

Telarium published eight adventure games. The games belonged to the genre of interactive fiction with graphics. One game (Shadowkeep) was also a role-playing video game. They were based on works of literature in the literary genres science fiction, fantasy, crime fiction and legal drama. Often they were developed in cooperation with established writers. The game development was a part of Spinnakers marketing strategy in the adventure game market in the 1980s: Target groups of Telarium adventures were grown-up players and target groups of Windham Classics, another Spinnaker subsidiary, were children. The development was managed by Seth Godin.

Two more adventure games were announced, but not published (Starman Jones, based on a science fiction novel by Robert A. Heinlein, and The Great Adventure, based on a science fiction novel by Philip Jose Farmer).

Reception

The Telarium adventures received critical acclaim. They were praised for the prime quality text, the detailed graphics and the interactive opportunities. The cooperation with famous writers like Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke and Michael Crichton was accentuated as a special feature of Telarium.