The Count... in your computer?

THE COUNT - You wake up in a large brass bed in a castle somewhere in Transylvania. Who are you, what are you doing here, and WHY did the postman deliver a bottle of blood? You'll love this ADVENTURE, in fact, you might say its Love at First Byte...

Original marketing material for 1979’s The Count

We’ve spent some time in this series of blogs discussing Dracula’s many forays into the world of movies, but of course, you will find him across many different mediums – including video games. You might be well aware of one of the most famous in the Castlevania series - also adapted by Netflix - but I want to go back a little further than that, to Dracula’s first foray into the burgeoning world of home computing. I’m talking about 1979’s The Count.

Those of you with long memories – or perhaps, like myself, of a certain vintage – will recall the age of the text adventure. These were very rudimentary play experiences that would tell you the story and set the scene through text, to which you would type responses along the lines of ‘walk south’ or ‘climb tree’.

Many will also remember the frustration of trying to find just the right combination of words to move the story along – it could be ‘walk south’, ‘go south’, ‘head south’, ‘travel south’ or something else entirely. Imagine a Choose Your Own Adventure book without the multiple choice and you’re about there.

The Count followed a protagonist who had been sent by the villagers of Transylvania to defeat Dracula himself, and to do this you would have to sneak into the castle and obtain certain items there to complete the mission. The game was the brainchild of Scott Adams of the company Adventure International, whose first game Adventureland was released the year before. The Count was pretty innovative for its era in that it used time as part of the gameplay – certain puzzles could only be solved on certain days, there was an active night and day cycle, and the character had to survive a full three in-game days in order to complete the game.

The 70s was a time of vast competition in the computing and video game market, so when I reel off just a smattering of the systems the game was released for you may simply look at me quizzically. This was all pre-video game crash and before the era of Nintendo and Sega entering the rivalry that defined gaming for so many years, but if you had (or have in the attic somewhere) a ZX-Spectrum, a TRS-80, a PET, an Apple II or a few others besides, you could still dust off this particular piece of interactive fiction.

Of course, the video game industry has grown and expanded exponentially since these days, and to modern eyes, The Count likely looks beyond archaic. But it does remain notable as the first game to bring Dracula into your gaming system – though it would certainly be anything but the last, as we’ll come back to soon…