In which Robin and Mr Jim begin to create a futuristic world entirely populated with robots.
Good evening. I am Robin Jubber Esq., and I will be your coder and designer for this epic journey into a world I have not yet finished building. Mr Jim has kindly agreed to handle the artistry, and we may be joined by other fine gentlefolk as the game progresses. Mr Mark King (from Level 42!) and Mr Bryan Henderson (from Scotland!) may well provide assistance on the musical front. My girlfriend might be pursuaded to help with the game testing, although this post is probably the first she’s heard about it, and I’m now in trouble.
The Setting
It is the far future and mankind has achieved remarkable things. Space elevators, interplanetary travel, teleportation – all now bordering on the possible. Or they were. Mankind seems to have simply upped sticks and vanished from the home of his birth. Or her birth as the case may be. Was there some sort of unexplained apocalypse? Everything still seems fine. No asteroids have smashed into the crust and covered the world in ghastly glowing space dust. No super volcanoes have erupted, covering the world in thick, choking igneous dust. You cannot detect high levels of radiation, as if global thermonuclear war had covered the world in horrendous radioactive dust. Cataclysms, dust based or otherwise, seem to have left Earth completely alone. It’s a mystery – and while robots are not famed for their original thought, some have banded together and started making decisions. This needs to be investigated!
The Premise
You are a robot, much like many others, and you have only recently rolled off the production lines. Your have no particularly noteworthy skills, but your manufacturing process is both cheap and swift. If, and indeed when, something goes wrong on your adventures, a replacement will be found post-haste. Your production line has been tasked by the robot council to investigate where the human masters all went. Why did they leave so suddenly, and why didn’t they take their forlorn robotic chums with them?
Your Quest
The last location on earth still drawing large amounts of power is a laboratory complex in the Atlantic ocean. Robots with quite large robot brains have decreed that you must be sent there to investigate where the hell the humans have got themselves off to. Did they travel up the space elevator in the centre of the labs, and if so, where to? A space elevator that doesn’t lead anywhere is just a very expensive, very inefficient, suicide ladder – and according to the available historical data, humans have always preferred efficiency when it comes to killing lots of other humans. It’s a puzzle, and you had better go and investigate. You feel like you were made for this mission! And of course, you literally were.
