Mystery House

To the Williamses' surprise, what Roberta had initially considered a hobby project sold more than 10,000 copies through mail-order. Including its 1982 rerelease through the SierraVenture line, 80,000 units were eventually sold worldwide, making it one of the best-selling computer games at the time. Mark Marlow reviewed Mission: Asteroid, Mystery House, and The Wizard and the Princess for Computer Gaming World, and stated that "Mystery House is considerably more difficult and provides many traps for the unwary in a wonderfully Victorian setting". Computer Gaming World in 1996 ranked it fourth on the magazine's list of the most innovative computer games. GamePro named Mystery House the 51st most important game of all time in 2007, for introducing a visual component to adventure games and for featuring graphics at a time when most computer games did not. Though the game is often considered the first adventure game to use graphics, dungeon crawl role-playing video games such as pedit5 (1975) had already been using graphics prior to its release. Applying graphics to an adventure game, however, was unprecedented as previous story-based adventure games were entirely text-based. Mystery House's success led the Williams to create the Hi-Res Adventures series, and note the game as Hi-Res Adventure #1. After the follow-on success of their next game, Wizard and the Princess, the pair moved into game development full-time, and On-Line Systems was incorporated in 1980 as Sierra On-Line. The game was later released into the public domain in 1987 as part of Sierra's seventh anniversary celebration. In Japan, several different adventure games under the title Mystery House were released. In 1982, MicroCabin released Mystery House, which was unrelated to (but inspired by) the On-Line Systems game of the same name. The following year, the Japanese company Starcraft released an enhanced remake of On-Line Systems' Mystery House with more realistic art work and depiction of blood, for the NEC PC-6001 and PC-8801, while Mystery House II for the MSX was released as a sequel to MicroCabin's Mystery House. The Japanese versions of Mystery House had sales of 50,000 units, including 30,000 copies on the MSX and 20,000 copies on the PC-6001, PC-8001, PC-8801, PC-9801, FM-7, and X1 computers. Mystery House was satirized in the 1982 adventure game Prisoner 2. One location from that game is a spooky house, where the player is told, "He's killed Ken!" and must seek absolution for murder. Elements from the game were later reintroduced in the Sierra On-Line game The Colonel's Bequest in 1989. Mystery House is considered one of first such games where exploration of a strange house, where things are not what they may be seem, is a central element to the game. Other such games that include this type of narrative include the Resident Evil series, Gone Home, the Castlevania series and What Remains of Edith Finch.