by Will Moczarski
Who was Jyym Pearson?
The sixth adventure game in our Med Systems marathon is the last one released in 1981, and it’s a rather famous one.
The Institute is also the first game I’ve played before (albeit in the later port for the Commodore 64), and it picks up on the ‘mental illness’ theme we’ve already encountered in
Deathmaze 5000,
Labyrinth and, especially,
Asylum. Jyym Pearson was the third freelance programmer to be published by Med Systems following Arti Haroutunian (
Microworld) and Simon Smith (
Knossos). Med Systems founder William Denman appears to have put some thought into his company’s portfolio, as
Microworld is a nice companion piece to his own
The Human Adventure, while Smith’s
Knossos picks up on the theme established in
Labyrinth, in which the player has to vanquish a mythical minotaur.
The Institute is sort of a companion piece to
Asylum, so much so that the former seems like a text-only version of the latter at first sight. However, Jyym Pearson was already an established author of text adventures when Med Systems first published one of his games, and he continued to make a name for himself through this fruitful collaboration. As this is as good a place as any to go back and play the four text adventure games that Pearson wrote before teaming up with Med Systems in 1981, I will hereby start a short sub-marathon of the four games that came before
The Institute.
It has to be noted that Jyym often didn’t work alone. His wife Robyn Pearson contributed to many of his adventure games and also received some credit for it. Like Alexa Adams, she is not as famous as her male counterpart which likely says a lot about the rules of early video game publicity, maybe even about our society in general. As it’s very difficult to research who did what exactly, I will try to be as accurate as possible in this regard but please bear in mind that I might underestimate the extent of Robyn’s work every once in a while which is, needless to say, completely unintentional.
Apart from his illustrious body of work, Jyym Pearson is a rather elusive personality. He wrote the odd editorial piece for early 1980’s computer magazines but it is rather difficult to find out more about his biography. Sadly, he succumbed to cancer in 1994 so it won’t be possible to conduct an interview with him, and moreover, Robyn Pearson appears to be such an widespread name that it proved impossible to find out what Jyym’s widow might be up to these days. All that I can gather is that Jyym apparently was an avid computer collector and a loving family father, but other than that we’ll have to let him speak through his works.
Jyym Pearson first entered the scene in 1980 with a text-based space simulation game called
Zossed in Space which had a small but loyal fanbase. In 1981, he wrote his first text adventure (
The)
Curse of Crowley Manor which was highly innovative being an early detective game steeped in occultist lore. It was released as one of Adventure International’s OtherVentures – a gig that Jyym was subsequently subscribed to, it seems. His next game,
Escape from Traam, was also released – as OtherVenture #3 – in 1981, and
Earthquake San Francisco 1906 followed the same year, labelled as #4. The Pearsons’ final game for Adventure Internationale,
Saigon: The Final Days, was also released in 1981 and became famous for immersing the player in a relatively contemporary story: the retreat of the Americans from Vietnam in 1975. The Pearsons’ other four adventure games were published by Med Systems over the following years, starting with
The Institute in 1981. They appear to have been very creative and prolific writers, never adhering to the most conventional adventure game tropes but always eager to stretch the limits of the still-juvenile form.
As an homage to these highly interesting writer personalities, I shall blog through the four 1981 Pearson games before continuing the actual Med Systems marathon with
The Institute. I had considered doing all of the OtherVentures in the process but the first one is just a port of the Crowther & Woods
Adventure called
Classic Adventure, and Lance Micklus’s 1979 classic
Dog Star Adventure was only labelled as an OtherVenture in a later re-release. I hope that you will enjoy this little detour but I’m very optimistic that the good reputation of these games is highly justified and that the Pearsons’s work should have a place on this blog dedicated to adventure game history.
