Mad Scientist is an interactive text adventure written by Thomas Hamlin III and presented in the November 1980 issue of Softside.
When the game begins you find yourself just outside of the gate to a huge mansion.
Once you go through the gate it clicks shut behind you and then an electric fence activates; trapping you inside. That’s not ominous. There a few locations to explore surrounding the house but eventually you’ll make your way up to the front door. Once you open and then go through the door it clicks shut behind you and now you’re trapped inside the house as well.
One of the interesting things that this game does is that it displays your possible exits in the lower left hand corner of the screen. For instance, in the screenshot above your possible exits are west and east. When you uncover a secret passage in the game, and there are many, you will see a new exit direction make itself available to you. Notice, in the lower right corner of the screen, up and down are also two exit choices in certain areas of the mansion. I find this graphic display to be refreshing and it helped to speed up gameplay.
What Mad Scientist DOESN’T do is allow you to keep track of any kind of inventory. You cannot pick up any objects nor do you use any object as a plot device. The only exception to this is the laser gun.
You find a laser gun when you stumble upon the Mad Scientist’s enormous laboratory. You can actually pick up the gun and once it is in your possession you can use it to shoot wandering skeletons and ghosts, which randomly appear while your exploring the mansion. The laser gun only has a few charges but they should be enough to get you through to the end of the game. If you do not have the gun in your possession, you can also run from the wandering creatures and you successfully escape 100% of the time. The downside is that the game then randomly deposits you in a different section of the house each time. It can sometimes even deposit you into hidden areas so fleeing might become a boon if you have not yet discovered one of the many hidden areas. However; fleeing can also make mapping a nightmare and this may annoy the completionist in you.
The laser gun is the only item that you can pick up and use. The things that you can manipulate will be objects in some of the rooms. You can flip a switch for example, or move a rug, climb a bookcase, etc. Since there is no inventory management there really then are no puzzles which you have to try and solve. This makes the game more of a walking simulator as you explore the many rooms of the mansion in an effort to find the Mad Scientist’s beautiful daughter.
The map of Mad Scientist is quite huge as there are many, many locations to uncover. The descriptions are brief and well written. It is possible to perish if you do not have the laser in your possession and try to fight the wandering creatures.
Once you find the beautiful daughter you have to successfully get her out of the mansion. There are two obstacles to overcome; the first is that you have to find an alternate way out of the house besides the front entrance and the second is that you have to find a way to deactivate the electrified fence surrounding the mansion. Neither one of these obstacles is too terribly hard to overcome.
I finished Mad Scientist in about an hour. Most of that time was spent carefully mapping out the many locations you’ll explore. I enjoyed the challenge and I still appreciate being able play these older games. I have a deep and abiding appreciation for those who have taken the time to preserve or archive many of these older game offerings in some way. If it were not for their work and dedication to doing so; we would never get to experience these older games and many would be likely lost forever.