09-16-2011, 04:10 PM
Hello all, this is Chris's dad, the creator of Quest of the Great Jewels and Zorphwar. To answer a few questions, the name for Zorph Enterprises was from a story by Stan Dryer called "Zorphwar" in an old issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction. I think this story can be found online if you google "zorphwar". His story inspired the game and I got permission from him to use the title in my game. Zorphwar was a pretty simplistic pbm game where you had a bunch of starships moving on a rectangular grid with integral coordinates that wrapped around in a toroidal shape. You fired weapons by inputting an X and Y velocity vector and tried to hit enemy ships before they got you. It was sort of like Battleship except the ships were moving and could accelerate and decelerate. It ran for only a couple of years and then died a well-deserved death.
QJ was designed in 1983 when I was working at a small company in Pittsburgh and had a lot of time on my hands - it was originally written in FORTRAN on a VAX computer, then when I wanted to run it from home, I rewrote it in C for my Northstar (64K ram, 5-1/4" floppy disc). IT was indeed inspired by Starweb - I thought it would be more interesting instead of having just one artifact do strange things (the Black Box in Starweb) the game would have LOTS of artifacts that did interesting things. QJ ran for several years and even won a best PBM game award once. I sold it to Rich van Ollefen - don't remember the exact date, but it was sometime in the mid 90's. I do remember the PBM convention in 1996 where a bunch of us played it live. I still have the T-shirt from that convention (which is the only reason I can remember the year).
QJ was designed in 1983 when I was working at a small company in Pittsburgh and had a lot of time on my hands - it was originally written in FORTRAN on a VAX computer, then when I wanted to run it from home, I rewrote it in C for my Northstar (64K ram, 5-1/4" floppy disc). IT was indeed inspired by Starweb - I thought it would be more interesting instead of having just one artifact do strange things (the Black Box in Starweb) the game would have LOTS of artifacts that did interesting things. QJ ran for several years and even won a best PBM game award once. I sold it to Rich van Ollefen - don't remember the exact date, but it was sometime in the mid 90's. I do remember the PBM convention in 1996 where a bunch of us played it live. I still have the T-shirt from that convention (which is the only reason I can remember the year).