As we can read from Wikipedia, Thomas M. Disch’s Amnesia is a text adventure game created by Cognetics Corporation, written by award-winning science fiction author Thomas M. Disch. The game was acquired and produced by Don Daglow and published by Electronic Arts (EA) in 1986 for the MS DOS PC and Apple II systems.
Robert Seddon has linked us to Jason Scott’s weblog, in which we can read about the “beta” version of Amnesia, that “was originally supposed to be released by book publisher Harper & Row, but that was cancelled”. It seems that part of the original story was cut from the final game, for space limitations. The original game’s manuscript created by Disch was preserved and shared thanks to Stephane. As we can read from Jason’s blog:
To be clear: this is not a novel, this is not a script in the sense most people think of a play or a shooting script. This is a specification outline for an interactive fiction, where the descriptions Disch works in are meant to be manipulated by the player in the process of exploring a world.
This is an interesting piece of gaming history and it’s nice to know that it was possible to save it from being lost forever. Huge props to Stephane and Jason for sharing their find and thanks to Robert Seddon for the link!
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Good lord, thanks for posting this. I first played this game when I was eleven or twelve in the 80s and it’s always stuck with me like . . . well, like things you experience at that age. Always felt like I missed something, even though I finished the game. Now I can see what, if anything, that might have been.
There are lots and lots of games that were cut or unreleased, we try the best we can to remember some of them :)