The Cottage (video game)

The Cottage is set in a surreal environment in the Småland province in Sweden, and has nine underground levels. and by finding and keeping treasures and valuable items. In exchange for some of their score, the player can receive hints or get resurrected following an in-game death. The player is ranked in accordance with their score: they start as a "clumsy rookie", and eventually become an "expert on Småland houses". Upon finishing the game, the player gets inducted into the cottage council. == Development ==

computer terminal.|alt=A photo of a Texas Silent Writer computer terminal with a blue telephone attached. The Cottage was originally developed in 1977–1978 by three children: brothers Viggo Kann (then Eriksson) and Kimmo Eriksson, and their friend Olle Johansson, who at the time of the project's start were ten, twelve and fourteen years old, respectively. Using Oden and the book What to Do After You Hit Return (1975), the Eriksson brothers and Johansson learned programming. and created the message board Thorvalds stugråd ("Thorvald's cottage council") for it; but had problems with compiling it for the PC, as it was a much larger BASIC program than most compilers could handle. Due to copyright issues, a scene in the mainframe version of the game where the player guest stars in The Muppet Show had to be cut for the commercial release, but all other materials remained intact; additionally, some visuals and audio were created and added for this release. The game was published by Scandinavian PC Systems for IBM PCs in Swedish, Danish, Norwegian and English in 1986. The developers negotiated with Scandinavian PC Systems, and were given 5 SEK per sold copy of the Swedish version and 2 SEK per sold foreign copy as royalties; 30,000 SEK of the royalties were pre-paid. == Reception and legacy ==

The Cottage was the first publicly available Swedish adventure video game, as well as one of the first commercially available Swedish video games. Through the late 1970s and early 1980s, the game had a cult-like status among people with access to Oden. QZ's superintendent was at some point going to remove their free accounts, but reversed the decision when the developers said that they would remove The Cottage from Oden if that happened. Clas Kristiansson of Svenska Hemdator Hacking was positive to the game in a 1987 review, saying that it despite an "unexciting and unoriginal" setting had a pleasant atmosphere, citing creature dialogue and cryptic elements such as labyrinths and elevators as contributing factors. He criticized the indoors movement system, calling it unnecessarily complex to have two sets of commands for movement depending on where the player is and illogical to enter commands for walking backwards to go in that direction. In his book Video Games Around the World, author Mark J.P. Wolf called the game an "impressive achievement" considering the developers' young age. Kristiansson called the decision to create an adventure game in Swedish commendable, and thought it could help counteract the IBM PC's stigma as not being a computer for average people in Sweden. ==Notes==