THE EVOLUTION OF QUESTPROBE
Questprobe was hugely ambitious. Not from Marvel’s perspective, 12 comic books over four years was nothing for a firm that by 1983 was publishing upwards of 40 titles a month. However, each Questprobe title was to be continued in a computer game, and so Marvel offered this daunting task to the highly prolific Scott Adams, whose company Adventure International had introduced text adventures to home computers in 1978 despite being told that it would be impossible due to the format’s lack of memory. AI then spent the following five years developing numerous adventures for countless home systems, which, as Scott explains, put the firm in the perfect position to meet Marvel’s demanding schedule. “Adventure International was contacted by the VP at Marvel, Joe Calamari,” Scott remembers. “He said he wanted to get Marvel comics licensed into the home computer game market, and that everyone he had talked to recommended Adventure International. After that, I went to Marvel’s Manhattan offices, and I met with Joe and Marvel’s chief editor Jim Shooter, and we worked out some of the preliminaries of what we would be doing. Marvel gave AI complete carte blanche on design, with its only requirement being that it would vet the art in the games to make sure that it conformed to Marvel’s standards.”
The design for Questprobe would involve Marvel’s heroes encountering an otherworldly but also somewhat familiar-looking character in
