Here are the Crocodracula games I've been able to track down:
(Big thanks to Harrison Gerard for help scanning these covers.)
Every nineties kid remembers the show Crocodracula, the infamous “Dark Shadows for tweens” that aired between nineteen eighty-something and nineteen ninety-something. If you’re not familiar, a quick web search will give you the details, but the broad strokes are these: Spunky teens find a medieval castle in a Florida swamp. Their discovery sets off a series of supernatural mysteries and adventures, all orbiting around the castle’s master, the enigmatic “Crocodracula.”
A nerdier subset of nineties kids will remember the computer game company Taleframe, infamous self-declared successors to Infocom. As the commercial text adventure market dried up, Taleframe managed to remain viable through predatory marketing strategies, playing fast and loose with intellectual property law, and generally toeing the line of becoming a full-fledged criminal enterprise. Original ideas being expensive and inconvenient to produce, most of Taleframe’s catalogue consisted of interactive adaptations of then-popular books and TV shows. Their Crocodracula games were some of the adaptations for which they legally procured the licensing rights.
It’s not clear how many Crocodracula games were produced; Taleframe was never passionate about careful or accurate recordkeeping. But the course the Fates have charted for me is such that more than one of these games have fallen into my hands. To preserve these games for posterity, I have ported them from Taleframe’s proprietary format to the much less hazardous Inform 7 language.
All(?) Taleframe games included “feelies” (extra little physical thingies) to enhance immersion and/or act as low-budget piracy protection. For each Crocodracula game I’ve ported, I’ve written a blog post with images of all the feelies I was able to recover. You’ll want to pore over those scans carefully if you want to enjoy the same gameplay experience as our 90s ancestors.
For the most part I have resigned myself to a life of rediscovering and porting old Crocodracula games, but in my few free moments I write my own interactive fiction, which you might like to check out. Thank you for your interest.
