Calderona Games is a small independent studio making graphic adventures the way they were made in 1988: every room hand-crafted in sixteen glorious colours, every puzzle designed for a player at the keyboard, and a text parser that actually answers back.

We love the games that came on a stack of floppy disks, loaded one disk at a time while you waited patiently for the next scene to appear. Games with strange worlds, clever puzzles, ridiculous characters and the occasional unfortunate encounter with a bottomless pit.

We think there is still plenty of adventure left in them.

So we're making new games for old machines, built to run on real MS-DOS hardware, sound-tracked by vintage sound cards, and just as happy running under DOSBox for those of you who have moved on to the terrifying world of modern computers.

No ray tracing. No micro-transactions. No 4K textures.

Just pixels, puzzles, a parser, and a save game you probably should have made five minutes ago.

Calderona Games — New Adventures. Old Machines.

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We are currently building a brand-new adventure for the SCI0 engine.

Yes, SCI0. Not SCI1. Not SCI2. Not some fancy modern engine with physics, ray tracing and enough colours to make your graphics card nervous.

It is being developed for MS-DOS, just as nature intended. It also runs happily under DOSBox, for those of you living in the frighteningly modern world of Windows, macOS and Linux.

The little game on our home page is just a snippet: a few rooms, ported to the web so you can have a wander. It is nothing like the real thing. The MS-DOS version has a proper parser, proper music, far more to do and considerably more ways to die.

This is our first game, and for now we're keeping most of the details safely locked away in a dark room somewhere. We can, however, reveal a few things:

• ◆320×200, 16 glorious EGA colours. Every scene is lovingly constructed from lines, dithered fills and the sort of graphical wizardry that once required an entire team of highly trained artists.
• ◆A real text parser. Type what you want to do. The game will understand most of it. Probably. Just don't get clever.
• ◆Points for cleverness. There is a score, and naturally you will want every last point. Because nothing says adventure like obsessively checking whether you've missed three points somewhere.
• ◆Save often. We are traditionalists. Besides, you never know when your brilliant plan is about to result in an untimely and completely avoidable death.
• ◆Proper period sound hardware. The game supports a whole collection of wonderfully obsolete musical machinery, including the Roland MT-32, Sound Blaster, AdLib, Yamaha FB-01, Casiotone CSM-1 / CT-460 and more. Because apparently one sound card wasn't enough.
• ◆No mouse required. Clicking is for amateurs.

It's still in development, so there isn't much more we can say just yet.

But we can say this:

It's coming.

Eventually.

Assuming we don't get stuck on our own puzzle.

And yes, you'll be able to run it on an actual MS-DOS machine.

You know, if you still have one.

Want to know when?

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Want to know the moment it's ready? Join the Calderona Games mailing list.

We'll write when there's real news: a release date, a demo, a screenshot we're too proud of to keep to ourselves.

We won't write every week. We won't write to tell you we miss you. We might write to tell you we got stuck on our own puzzle.

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