Simon the Sorcerer: The British Answer to LucasArts

Adventure Soft released Simon the Sorcerer in 1993, and the first thing anyone noticed was how blatantly it borrowed its interface from LucasArts. A verb bar along the bottom. A point-and-click cursor. An inventory you clicked and dragged rather than typed commands into. Simon Woodroffe’s team in Aylesbury had studied Monkey Island the way a covers band studies a setlist, and they weren’t shy about it. What they added was a voice that no LucasArts game had: a bored, smart-mouthed English kid who treats the entire fantasy genre with open contempt.

Simon is dragged through a wardrobe portal into a fantasy realm and immediately starts complaining. He’s rude to wizards, dismissive of prophecies, and unimpressed by dragons — a running joke that plays as gentle parody of Tolkien-by-way-of-Dungeons-and-Dragons fantasy furniture rather than any specific book. The joke lands because the game around him keeps a straight face. Dwarves are genuinely gruff, wizards genuinely pompous, and Simon’s sarcasm cuts against a world that takes itself seriously, which is the oldest trick in British comedy and still the one people forget how to do.

Puzzles as a filing cabinet, not a maze

The design owes its structure to the LucasArts school in the strictest sense: no dead ends, no unwinnable states, an inventory that only ever holds objects you’ll need. That was a real departure from Sierra’s contemporaneous King’s Quest and Space Quest lines, where wandering off a cliff or forgetting to grab a torch three screens back could quietly end your game hours before you noticed. Adventure Soft adopted the LucasArts fairness contract wholesale, and it’s worth remembering how radical that contract still felt in 1993 — plenty of UK adventures from the same period hadn’t caught up yet.

Where Simon earns its own identity is in the density of its gags. Nearly every object you can examine has a written joke attached, and nearly every wrong combination produces a specific, written failure line rather than a generic “that doesn’t work.” The game bets that a player will click on everything just to hear what Simon says about it, and it wins that bet because the writing (credited largely to Simon Woodroffe himself) is genuinely funny rather than merely reference-heavy. There are cracks at fairy tale logic, at fantasy-novel prose style, at the adventure genre’s own habit of hiding the solution behind an obscure pun — the game mocks its own genre’s worst habits while committing to them completely.

Why the puzzle logic still holds up

The puzzle chain that gets cited most — swapping a series of items across NPCs to eventually acquire a specific object, a barter economy running four or five links deep — works because each individual trade makes sense on its own terms before you see the whole chain. You give the dwarf what he wants because he’s visibly established as wanting it, not because a walkthrough told you to. That’s the difference between a puzzle with internal logic and a puzzle that’s just an obstacle: the good version teaches you the world’s rules as you solve it, and Simon is disciplined about that even when the humour is broad.

Compare this to the design lineage traced in Ron Gilbert’s puzzle grammar for Monkey Island — the rule that a puzzle’s solution should be guessable in hindsight, never merely stumbled into. Simon follows that grammar closely enough that it plays like a natural extension of the Monkey Island school rather than an imitation of its surface. The verb interface is nearly identical to LucasArts’ contemporary titles, but the joke density and the specifically British targets — panto villains, fairy-tale clichés, a general suspicion of anyone taking themselves too seriously — are Adventure Soft’s own.

A parser game underneath the icons

It’s worth remembering what Adventure Soft actually was before Simon: a publisher of text parser adventures going back to the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64, trading under names like Adventure International UK before that. Simon Woodroffe and his brother had spent years writing games where the interface was a keyboard and a cursor prompt, and that background shows in how Simon the Sorcerer handles its verb bar. The nine icons along the bottom — walk, look, use, talk, and so on — read like a parser’s verb list translated into pictograms rather than a system designed from scratch for the mouse. That’s not a criticism; it’s a pedigree. The jokes are text-adventure jokes at heart, built for a player who reads every description rather than one who’s clicking through to the next cutscene, and the game trusts you to read.

The animation, courtesy of a small team that would go on to found other UK studios, gave Simon a physical comic timing that the writing alone couldn’t manage — a shrug, an eye-roll, a specific way of slumping against scenery while waiting for the player to make a decision. Character animation on this scale was still expensive in 1993, and Adventure Soft spent the budget on it because the humour depended on watching Simon’s face as much as reading his lines. That combination — parser-era joke density plus a fully expressive point-and-click cast — is a large part of why the game reads as more than a Monkey Island copy despite wearing its influences on its sleeve.

The sequels and the long tail

Simon the Sorcerer II: The Lion, the Wizard and the Wardrobe followed in 1995, doubling down on the joke density and adding a co-writing credit that brought in more sustained gag-per-scene pacing. Adventure Soft kept the series going in various forms — CD talkie re-releases, a Simon-flavoured puzzle spin-off, and eventually new instalments after the studio’s reformation in the 2000s and 2010s — but the franchise’s commercial peak stayed firmly in that mid-90s window when European PC adventure gaming was still a mass-market proposition rather than a niche one. Adventure Soft itself effectively split and reformed more than once over the following two decades, with rights to the Simon name changing hands, which is its own quiet story about how fragile ownership gets in an industry that didn’t take character IP seriously until it was too late for a lot of small studios.

What’s held up is the writing, not the technology. The SCUMM-style interface Simon borrowed has been obsolete for a quarter of a century; drag-and-drop inventory management gave way first to simplified single-cursor interaction and then, in most modern adventures, to dialogue-wheel and hotspot-highlight systems that assume a controller in your hands rather than a mouse. None of that matters to whether the jokes land. A well-written line about a dwarf’s opinion of adventurers is exactly as funny running under DOSBox on a modern laptop as it was on a 486 in 1993, which is the real test any comedy game has to pass, and about the only one Simon the Sorcerer was ever trying to sit.

The UK adventure scene it came from

It’s easy to forget, looking back from a games industry now dominated by American and Japanese studios, how much of the early-90s European adventure scene was genuinely competitive with LucasArts and Sierra rather than derivative of them. Revolution Software was building its own reputation out of Hull around the same time, and Adventure Soft’s own back catalogue stretched to text adventures on 8-bit micros before Simon ever picked up a wand. British studios had a decade of home-computer adventure writing behind them by 1993 — the Level 9 text parsers, the Magnetic Scrolls games, a whole cottage industry that had learned to write jokes and puzzles on Z80 processors with no disk space to spare. Simon the Sorcerer is what that tradition looked like once it got a mouse and 256 colours.

The game sold well enough across Europe, especially in Germany, to spawn a sequel within two years and keep Adventure Soft’s lights on through most of the decade. It never became a US household name the way Monkey Island did, but it didn’t need to: it built its own audience on its own terms, and it proved that the point-and-click grammar LucasArts had standardised wasn’t proprietary. Anyone with a good writer and a straight-faced fantasy setting to send up could make it work.

Spoilers below

The full plot involves Simon eventually confronting the wizard Sordid, whose defeat at the game’s climax turns out to be less about combat than about outmanoeuvring him through the same object-trading logic that’s carried the whole adventure — Simon tricks Sordid using an illusion spell built from components gathered across the map, rather than any direct confrontation, which keeps the game’s non-violent, puzzle-first identity intact right to the credits.

The ending is deliberately anticlimactic in the way the whole game has trained you to expect: Sordid is dispatched, Simon expresses no growth or sentimentality about the experience, and the closing joke undercuts any sense that a hero’s journey has actually taken place. That refusal to sentimentalise its own story is very on-brand — the game spends forty screens making fun of fantasy tropes and isn’t about to earn one sincerely in its last five minutes.

None of that resolution actually depends on you knowing the details in advance, which is the mark of an adventure game built around jokes and puzzles rather than plot twists — the pleasure was always in reading what Simon has to say about the next room, not in wondering how the story ends. If you want to see where that puzzle-fairness discipline led once studios started building for a public that no longer bought floppy disks in shops, Day of the Tentacle is the version of the same grammar running at its most confident.