Robico Software

Company founded by Rob O'Leary and Mike O'Leary to market their interactive fiction games.

They released several games, mainly for the BBC Micro and Electron computers from Acorn. Though ports for some of their games were made for the Archimedes, Amstrad and Commodore 64. The games were famous throughout the Acorn world for having large amounts of text squeezed into the tiny memory (32K) of the BBC Micro and Election.

The Engine used by the games seems to use a standard database for objects and descriptions but used hard coded 6502 machine code to perform actions.

The Games

Robico released the following games:

• Saga of a Spy Trilogy:
  • Rick Hanson a.k.a. Assassin (Rob O'Leary and Mike O'Leary; 1985).
  • Project Thesius (Rob O'Leary and Mike O'Leary; 1986).
  • Myorem (Rob O'Leary and Mike O'Leary; 1986).
• Realm of Chaos Trilogy (only the first part was released):
  • Village of Lost Souls (Glen McCauley and Martin Moore; 1987; BBC Micro, Electron , Amstrad CPC).

• The Hunt - The Search for Shauna (Ian Muriss; 1987).
• Escape from Enthar 7 (Ian Muriss; 1988; BBC Micro, Electron, Archimedes).
• Island of Xaan (Rob O'Leary; 1984).
• Blood Of The Mutineers (Rob O'Leary and Mike O'Leary; 1988).
• Stranded! (Howard Roberts and Tony Heap).
• Rise in Crime (Howard Roberts and Tony Heap; Archimedes).

The Engine

There has been some work done on decoding the Robico Engine.

Both Stranded! and Rise in Crime were written by Heyley software using their own engine called HATRACK (Howard And Tony's Radical Adventure Creating Kit) which was based on the Adventurescape system.