Abenteuer Atlantis, now available in English!
I started this project last summer, and announced it when I showed this game off at Big Bad Gameathon, so it's been in the works for a while now. It wasn't even that much work, I just procrastinated a ton, so I'm especially glad to announce that it's finally finished.
My fan translation of Abenteuer Atlantis, the Knorr point-and-click advergame with beloved instant soup gnome Knorrli, is finally done and you can get it right here: https://archive.org/download/abenteuer-atlantis-dos-english/Abenteuer-Atlantis_DOS_EN.zip
If you need any help getting through the game, since it can be pretty obtuse, I also wrote a walkthrough for it: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/353477-abenteuer-atlantis/faqs/79949
And while I've got you here, why not talk a bit about the game and the translation effort, and about Knorrli himself?
Knorr is a German food company that is present in lots of countries these days. You might know them for their instant soups, instant foods, bouillon and stuff. In Switzerland, they introduced an advertising mascot back in 1948, namely our little soup gnome Knorrli. A few years ago Knorr officially celebrated his 70th birthday, and he's supposedly one of the most well-known advertising mascots in Switzerland.
You can read more about Knorrli here (the article is in English): https://www.werbewoche.ch/en/marketing/marken/2018-06-14/immer-noch-kult-knorrli-wird-70-jahre-alt/
For some reason, back in 1992 Knorr commissioned an advertising point-and-click adventure about their little guy. This kind of game was not uncommon at the time, with other point-and-click adventures about the German Telekom or about the meat snack Bifi among others. I believe these games were usually distributed more or less for free, or maybe requiring you to send in some packaging slips or other proof of purchase. Many of these games are documented here (in German): https://werbespiel.blogspot.com/
You might expect a rather low-quality game when it was made as an advertisement, but Abenteuer Atlantis has some decent qualities. Most people become aware of it because of Knorrli's representation in it, especially the image at the top of this post, but it generally has some good graphics, and especially some nice backgrounds. The music is often straight-up great, and very pleasant to listen to. Gameplay-wise it can be pretty mean or obtuse, but that is par for the course for many older adventure games.
The original writing is a weird mix of old-timey epic narration in the style of ancient myths and fairy tales, and comedic modern day German with an irreverent tone, particularly reminding me of the often pretty funny dubs of Bud Spencer movies. I tried to match that tone in the translation as well as I could, but I'm not exactly a professional translator, so the translation is probably lacking some of the flavor of the original text.
As for the technical aspects of the translation, this being an old DOS game of low complexity made it fairly easy. Almost all of the text is just in the main binary, in normal DOS text encoding. I tried to make the translated texts no longer than the original text, so I wouldn't have to bother with relocating them. The biggest hurdle was that a tiny bit of relevant text was written on the UI images, instead of being stored as text. I had to figure out the custom image format of the game, so I could modify the images and translate the UI verbs like "walk", "talk", and so on.
If you're interested in the technical details, or maybe even want to roll your own translation of the game, you can find my sources here: https://github.com/mooware/knorrli-en
I'm interested in doing more fan translation work in the future. Next time I'll probably just stick to the technical hacking part and let someone more capable handle the text translation, which was surprisingly challenging; most games I'd like to work on also probably aren't in a language I can translate.
So that's Abenteuer Atlantis, freshly translated for your enjoyment. I hope at least a few people will make use of it and have fun playing it.