In the mid-90s, trying to come up with a unique birthday present was no easy task, thanks to the absence of sites like AliExpress. That is how Arron Hawke, a meteorologist from the UK, ended up developing a unique point-and-click adventure game as a gift for his little sister, Neighbours: the Adventure. The game was an unauthorized tie-in based on the Australian soap opera Neighbours, and it would end up being one of the very first fan games to make its way to players all over the world.
Hawke remembers that he decided to develop the game as a present and also because he had been rewatching old tapes of the show while making his way through university and work. "My mum watched it in the mid-'80s, and while pretending I wasn’t interested, I soon found myself invested in the characters". In the end, the project became much bigger than he anticipated, taking up to a full two years of development.
Developed on the Commodore Amiga, the game uses stills from the actual program, taken from the VHS Arron had been watching. The player can interact with various characters from the show, using a classic interface with verbs, while moving around through different locations is accomplished by simply clicking on the appropriate direction on a compass.
What makes Neighbours: The Adventure still notable today?
As opposed to other fan games that came before, Neighbours: the Adventure is unique for its complexity, as Arron ended up developing a fully-fledged adventure game. The story was taken from an episode of the soap opera, where Paul Robinson tries to buy the Lassiter's Complex, a small shopping and hotel complex in Erinsborough. Coincidentally, that very same year the soap opera also received an official tie-in game, a skateboarding action title published on most popular home computer of the time.
In the end, despite all of his hard work, although seemingly happy about the gift, Arron remembers his sister did not seem to be very interested in actually playing the game. Naturally, Neighbours: the Adventure could not receive a commercial release, since Arron did not own any copyrights over the images he used in-game. Still, that did not stop him from distributing the game for free by sharing it through floppy disks and uploading it on the bulletin board networks of the time.
The game definitely transcended its humble origins and even managed to get reviewed in a couple of magazines of the time, such as Amiga Power, which gave it a 60% noting how "it's fun in a warped kind of way", while The One Amiga gave it a rating of 83% apparently appreciating how "there's a few digitized screens of the sexy twins to ogle over if you get bored with the game itself".
The soap opera Neighbours is still going strong today, enjoying its 40-year anniversary since its original network release in Australia, on the Seven Network, in March 1985. While Arron never became a game developer after this first experience, he seems to recall the experience as a fun little time. "The game didn’t bring me fame or fortune," he notes, "ultimately, I failed, but I had a good time failing".
The post 34 years ago an obsessed soap opera viewer made one of the very first fan games appeared first on Destructoid.
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