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Tajemství Oslího ostrova (often abbreviated as Too), known in English as The Secret of Donkey Island, is a 1994 Czech point-and-click adventure video game. Distributed by Petr Vochozka through his company Vochozka Trading in June 1994, it was the first nationally distributed PC game in the country and one of the first Czech games commercially available. A parody of the successful Monkey Island series, the story plays out as if it were a direct sequel to The Secret of Monkey Island, ignoring the continuity of Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge.
The story of The Secret of Donkey Island is a parody sequel to two famous American games. It was made using different software, and most importantly, released for a Czech audience. For those who never played the original games, let us summarise the story: In the first game, young Guybrush Threepwood becomes a pirate, and must save a beautiful governor from the hands of the ghost pirate LeChuck.
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Tajemství Oslího ostrova - DOS version |
He eventually succeeds, and the ghost of LeChuck is
destroyed. In the second game, Guybrush Threepwood searches for the legendary treasure of Big-Whoop. LeChuck’s followers are successful in reanimating his body. LeChuck, now in the form of an animated corpse, tries to take revenge on Guybrush. Guybrush finds the treasure and meets with zombie LeChuck. After a dramatic ending, LeChuck is crippled, and hopefully, definitely dead.
Our story begins a few years later. LeChuck’s brother LeGek appears, and the life of Guybrush Threepwood is once again threatened. A pirate galleon captained by Guybrush, is destroyed by LeGek, leaving Guybrush to become a lone survivor. He awakens on a beach of an unknown island. And that’s how our game begins…
Jarek Kolář and Petr Vlček began working on the game in 1992 using school computers in the gymnasium of Slovanské náměstí in Brno where they were students. They wanted to use their own game-making tools as well as the ZX Spectrum tools they had been working with. In 1993, Petr Vochozka sold the first-ever Czech commercial adventure game for the Amiga entitled Světák Bob. Later that year, he founded Polička-based Vochozka Trading and released Tajemství Oslího ostrova as the publisher's debut title.
Development took place between 1992 and 1994. In the first year, the developers used their school computer after receiving permission from their computer science teacher. They faced several challenges, as there was limited information on how to make video games available to developers.
Visual assets from other adventure games were used, which, years later in 2018, caused the magazine Excalibur to express surprise that there were no licensing issues. However, the game's sound effects were created by the developers themselves using computer speakers. Tajemství Oslího ostrova was also one of the first Czech games to feature developed graphics.
Originally, Kolář and Vlček had no plans to make the game commercially available. They created it to prove that Czech citizens could create a game on par with international productions. They did not care if the game was released commercially or as freeware, but after seeing an advert by Vochozka in Excalibur, the only Czech game magazine at the time, they joined Vochozka under the Pterodon Software brand. The game sold 2,000 copies for 240 crowns each, a considerable increase on Světák Bob, which had sold only a few hundred copies. Vochozka set up an exclusive contract to spread the games of the Pterodon team.
The retail version of the game was originally wrapped only in a plastic bag. A paper-box edition was not available until November of the same year, at which point the second Pterodon Software game was released entitled 7 dní a 7 nocí . The game was released only five years after the Velvet Revolution, when only a small fraction of Czech society understood English. By the end of 1996, Vochozka Trading had produced twelve games.
An English fan translation was released in 2023.
More details about this game can be found on
Wikipedia.org.
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This version of Tajemství Oslího ostrova was designed for personal computers with operating system MS-DOS (Microsoft Disk Operating System),
which was operating system developed by Microsoft in 1981. It was the most widely-used operating system in the first half of the 1990s. MS-DOS was supplied
with most of the IBM computers that purchased a license from Microsoft. After 1995, it was pushed out by a graphically more advanced system - Windows and
its development was ceased in 2000. At the
time of its greatest fame, several thousand games designed specifically for computers with this system were created. Today, its development is no longer continue
and for emulation the free DOSBox emulator is most often used. More information about MS-DOS operating system can be found
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5 different online emulators are available for Tajemství Oslího ostrova. These emulators differ not only in the technology they use to emulate old games, but also in support of various game controllers, multiplayer mode, mobile phone touchscreen, emulation speed, absence or presence of embedded ads and in many other parameters. For
maximum gaming enjoyment, it's important to choose the right emulator, because on each PC and in different Internet browsers, the individual emulators behave differently. The basic
features of each emulator available for this game Tajemství Oslího ostrova are summarized in the following table:
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