Jméno růže

Jméno růže (The Name of the Rose) is an adventure created under the pseudonym George K. by Jiří Koudelka and released in 1991 by Proxima – Software v.o.s. Despite its title, it does not literally adapt Umberto Eco's novel of the same name – the main character isn't Eco's monk William of Baskerville but the movie inspector Jacques Clouseau, known from the Pink Panther series, whom the plot sends to a monastery in Germany, home to a mysterious order of nuns called Posxtey, to investigate suspicious events hidden behind the monastery walls.

The game was unusually large for the ZX Spectrum, and because it couldn't fit entirely into 48 kilobytes of memory at once, individual parts had to be continuously loaded from the storage medium on the fly, which was a fairly unusual solution on eight-bit machines. Because of this, it was initially released only for computers connected to a Didaktik 40 floppy drive, and it wasn't until 1993 that a version was made for the 128-kilobyte Spectrum, which eliminated the need for on-the-fly loading and allowed the game to also come out on cassette, making it accessible to a much wider circle of players.

The combination of a parodic plot, a large world, and a technically demanding solution makes Jméno růže one of the more ambitious domestic adventures of the early nineties, a time when the domestic scene was no longer afraid to tackle larger and technically more complicated projects. The humor built on the contrast between a serious literary source and a grotesque film character gave the game a distinctive tone that set it apart from more seriously toned foreign adventures as well as from earlier domestic text adventures. It also shows how freely creators of the time worked with foreign source material and genre conventions, piecing together an original, distinctive story from various sources – a famous novel and a film comedy – tailored to the tastes of domestic players of the time. The technical demands the game's scope forced upon it make Jméno růže an interesting piece of evidence of just how far domestic amateur creation could be pushed at the twilight of the eight-bit era.