''Radical Castle'' is a

point-and-click adventure game An adventure game is a video game genre in which the player assumes the role of a protagonist in an interactive story driven by exploration and/or puzzle-solving. The genre's focus on story allows it to draw heavily from other narrative-based m ...

released for

Macintosh The Mac (known as Macintosh until 1999) is a family of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc. Macs are known for their ease of use and minimalist designs, and are popular among students, creative professionals, and software en ...

in 1986, developed in

World Builder World Builder is a game creation system for point-and-click adventure games. It was released in 1986 by Silicon Beach Software and had already been used for creating Enchanted Scepters in 1984. On August 7, 1995, developer William C. Appleton ...

and distributed as

shareware Shareware is a type of proprietary software that is initially shared by the owner for trial use at little or no cost. Often the software has limited functionality or incomplete documentation until the user sends payment to the software developer ...

by Christopher Kent Wigginton. Players assume the role of the 'Squire', who after mistaking the princess for a serving wench, is given a choice by the King between death and a quest to recover an oracle stolen by a wizard. At one point of the game an area identical to the opening screen of '' Enchanted Scepters'' is shown; if the player chooses to go forward a prompt is given encouraging the player to purchase ''Enchanted Scepters'' from

Silicon Beach Software Silicon Beach Software, Inc., was an early American developer of software products for the Macintosh personal computer. It was founded in San Diego, California in 1984 by Charlie Jackson and his wife Hallie. Jackson later co-founded FutureWave S ...

. The game was distributed on magazine shareware collection disks,

Macintosh user group A Macintosh User Group (MUG) is a users' group of people who use Macintosh computers made by Apple Inc. or other manufacturers and who use the Apple Macintosh operating system (OS). These groups are primarily locally situated and meet regularly t ...

mail-outs, and pre-Internet online services. Gaming historian Richard Moss described it as a standout amongst early World Builder games, popular with players due to its

Monty Python Monty Python (also collectively known as the Pythons) were a British comedy troupe who created the sketch comedy television show '' Monty Python's Flying Circus'', which first aired on the BBC in 1969. Forty-five episodes were made over fo ...

-esque humor. At the height of its popularity the game made the top 100 downloads on

GEnie Jinn ( ar, , ') – also romanized as djinn or anglicized as genies (with the broader meaning of spirit or demon, depending on sources) – are invisible creatures in early pre-Islamic Arabian religious systems and later in Islamic m ...

. It can be played on a modern computer using Mini

vMac VMAC is a block cipher-based message authentication code (MAC) algorithm using a universal hash proposed by Ted Krovetz and Wei Dai Wei Dai ( zh, c=戴伟) is a computer engineer known for contributions to cryptography and cryptocurrencies. ...

. Macscene.net featured it as their "Retro game of the week" in August 2010. The review praised the games visuals, sound effects and storyline. ''

MacUser ''MacUser'' was a monthly (formerly biweekly) computer magazine published by Dennis Publishing Ltd. and licensed by Felden in the UK. It ceased publication in 2015. In 1985 Felix Dennis’ Dennis Publishing, the creators of MacUser in the UK, ...

'' cited ''Radical Castle'' as an example of World Builder's "ability to allow authors to design commercial-quality adventure games." In 1987, ''

Macworld ''Macworld'' is a website dedicated to products and software of Apple Inc., published by Foundry, a subsidiary of IDG Inc. It started life as a print magazine in 1984 and had the largest audited circulation (both total and newsstand) of Macin ...

'' selected ''Radical Castle'' as a runner-up to ''Deep Angst'' as the best World Builder game.

References

External links

Radical Castle
playable emulation, at the

Internet Archive The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music ...

1986 video games Classic Mac OS games Classic Mac OS-only games First-person adventure games Video games developed in the United States {{adventure-videogame-stub