Deus Ex Machina (video game)
1984 video game
Deus Ex Machina is a video game designed and created by Mel Croucher and published by Automata UK for the ZX Spectrum in October 1984 and later converted to MSX and Commodore 64.
The game was the first to be accompanied by a fully synchronised soundtrack which featured narration, celebrity artists and music. The cast included Ian Dury, Jon Pertwee, Donna Bailey, Frankie Howerd, E.P. Thompson, and Croucher (who also composed the music). Andrew Stagg coded the original Spectrum version, and Colin Jones (later known as author/publisher Colin Bradshaw-Jones) was the programmer of the Commodore 64 version.
The game charts the life of a "defect" which has formed in "the machine", from conception, through growth, evolution and eventually death. The progression is loosely based on "The Seven Ages of Man" from the Shakespeare play, As You Like It and includes many quotations and parodies of this. The original game would later be rereleased alongside a sequel/remake in 2015.
Gameplay
Players of the game take control of a defective machine which has taken the form of the human body. The players would experience the different stages of life, all the way from being a cell to being a senile old being. It is considered to be a work of audiovisual entertainment although the game itself does not have sound.
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This entry incorporates text from “Deus Ex Machina (video game)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.