Labyrinth: The Computer Game

published by Activision in 1986-11, developed by Lucasfilm Games, running on Apple II E

type: adventure
genre: Fantasy, Interactive fiction
series: Labyrinth movie tie-in
perspective: side view
player options: single player

languages: eng

Technical specs

display: raster

Editor note

The protagonist of the game is not Sarah Williams. Rather, a movie goer is taken into Jared's Labyrinth while watching the movie. The developers wanted "the player to play the game as himself". Despite the poor choice of pronoun in that quote, in the game, the player must select to be male of female.

The game begins as a text-adventure. It becomes a graphics+text adventure when the movie starts. This is a reference to The Wizard of Oz movie. It was suggested by Douglas Adams.

Rather than free-form typing two word commands like the vast majority of adventure games, this game uses "word wheels" to construct commands. These wheels are a radial menu, Typical radial menus rotate on the Z-axis. Labyrinth's radial menus rotate on the X-axis. David Fox did this to avoid the player having blindly try various words to find which ones work. This is nice if you are not a text-adventure purist that considers cryptic guessing of key words to be part of the game.

This computer game made more money than the movie.

This was Lucasfilm's first adventure game and development lead to what became the SCUMM engine. SCUMM's point-and-click interface has its roots in the word wheels of labyrinth.