Color

Color by Number v1.2 is Lucy24's adventure title for the Macintosh, archived to Info-Mac as color-1.hqx. It is a sequel-of-sorts to her earlier game The Tower: another abandoned building by the same architect, built for a cheapskate this time, so do not expect twelve-foot-thick walls or hidden staircases - just probably treasure.

The setup

The author's framing, lifted verbatim from the BinHex header: "Jake heard about another abandoned building designed by the architect of The Tower, so of course he had to go check it out. And that's the last anyone's heard of him." Jake's wife is spitting mad about him bailing on her experiment, and the player is the one she's calling in to track him down. "Who could resist an invitation like that? Not Jake, obviously... And not you."

Tone and lineage

The header's narrative voice - first-person dialogue from Jake's wife, dry parenthetical asides, treasure as a forgone conclusion - sets a comic adventure tone closer to Hitchhiker's-style text adventures than to grid-crawl dungeon games. The reference to The Tower (Lucy24's earlier title) presumes the player knows the prior game's geography.

System requirements

Spelled out plainly in the upload: a Mac with 256 or more colours, a 12-inch or larger monitor, 32-bit QuickDraw, and at least two sound channels. The application prefers 2.4 MB free RAM but "can run on less." The colour-and-monitor constraints place this firmly in the mid-to-late-1990s mainstream Mac envelope.

Provenance

Author Lucy24, contact Lucy24@aol.com, with a series page at members.aol.com/Lucy24/LucysWorlds.html. Distributed as color-1.hqx on Info-Mac. No Macintosh Garden mirror at games/color or games/color-by-number; the BinHex header (which includes the full opening narrative quoted above) is the canonical preserved description of the title.