L'Égérie
A first in electronic literature
What is L'Egérie?
Written by François Coulon and Laurent Cotton in the dark in 1990 for the Atari ST, adapted in 1993 for Mac, played online since 2018, L'Egérie is one of the very first experiments in electronic literature, breaking with the universe of adventure games.
Who are you Amandine Palmer?
Parisian in 1990, you could have known her... And some suspect us of having been in love with her... Try to direct and follow the destinies of a young red-haired and intrepid Parisian, accompanied by her eternal cat, Humphrey. Amandine Palmer will end up mother, muse, reporter, lover, in the sun or in blood sausage.
If it used the same computer support and certain codes of the illustrated adventure game, the L'Egérie prefigures much more a form of graphic novel, analog or digital: a narrative evolution both in time and in space, an action described in the past tense, the emphasis on the story and the characters. Not to mention a contemporary universe and, all militancy aside, a female main character -parties practically inconceivable at the time.
Sometimes misunderstood in its first incarnation on Atari ST by who expected a score to beat, puzzles to solve or an explicit goal to achieve, L'Egérie has been, since its first conversion on Mac three years later and its introduction in the burgeoning world of digital art, the object of an undeniable underground attention.
Thirty years after its birth, it was time to program L'Egérie for the Apple IIgs, scrupulously respecting the integrity of the original elements - a vintage rendering that will surprise the youngest and delight the most nostalgic. Redhead assumed, Amandine will always claim her large pixels.
.2mg disk image (32MB, multilingual)
