Novelization by Alan Dean Foster.
From a video game developed by Telarium/Trillium and published by Spinnaker Software.
Available for Apple II computers.
…
“It’s difficult to be a tourist in a void.”
-Alan Dean Foster, Shadowkeep (1984), p. 155.
...
Review by William D. Tucker.
Internet tells me that this is the first video game novelization.
Appropriately, it’s also the most basic swords-and-sorcery role-playing game story imaginable.
You have the bland-as-fluorescent-lighting human protagonist who is the one chosen by fate to vanquish evil from the land.
This guy sets out on his journey and collects three other companions:
a goofy kangaroo man who is the comic relief;
a beautiful and smart elf lady who solves all the puzzles;
a tough guy lizardman who kicks the most ass;
and this quartet is on their way to a tower of evil called Shadowkeep.
Inside Shadowkeep are booby traps and monster hordes and magic items and holographic teleport walls and treasure beyond the dreams of avarice and lots of things you might expect from a computerized role-playing game. You even get a set piece boss battle with a slimy, partially submerged abomination called a Brollachian that wouldn’t be out of place in a Dark Souls or Souls-like game.
It’s totally fine. It’s all acceptable.
Writer Alan Dean Foster is a prolific and respected science fiction author (the Pip and Flinx series) with a profitable, decades-long side hustle in media tie-in novels. Foster has written novelizations of numerous movies: Star Wars, The Thing, Dark Star, Starman, Outland, The Black Hole, Clash of the Titans, Krull, The Last Starfighter, Alien, Aliens, Alien 3, Alien: Covenant, and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen to name a few. Foster also wrote the novelization of the computer adventure game The Dig.
Foster’s philosophy regarding media tie-in books is that, given his choice in the matter, he gets to do a ‘Novelist’s Cut’ of a movie or computer game. In other words, he takes the original material which is suited to the silver screen or PC or Apple II monitor and then he changes it so that the same material has integrity as a prose fantasy and/or science fiction narrative. But, if the intellectual property owners don’t want him messing around with the source material too much, then Foster will just do a straight write-up in unadorned prose of the screenplay. Foster has his ideal working approach, but he is also a realist in these matters.
(BTW, my favorite Foster novelizations are Alien, The Thing, Krull, Outland, Dark Star, and Clash of the Titans. So now you know all that.)
I almost hesitate to recommend Shadowkeep to someone who has never read a Foster book, since this is such a basic piece of work, and therefore doesn’t really give you the full power of the author’s talent. And yet, Foster’s effective, concrete writing style is here; as is his tendency to try to find some amount of intellectually respectable justification for the storytelling absurdities inherent within video game constructs. Foster goes to some trouble to establish why an innkeeper would set up his business in the vicinity of a sinister tower of supreme evil. It turns out . . . the profit motive might be stronger than metaphysical principles of Good and Evil, Light and Dark, Order and Chaos and what have you. I buy that.
In the end . . . it is all perfectly fine.
This is the kind of book I used to love to come across in a used bookstore or thriftstore. I’ve read almost all of the Foster-drafted media tie-ins over the years, and I’m never less than diverted by them. Shadowkeep is a minor historical milestone in the grand scheme of popular genre literature, and an easy enough read. Bland, reassuring entertainment for chaotic-as-a-motherfucker times.
