Pyramid Adventures Episode 1

Welcome to the micropage for Pyramid Adventures Episode 1! This should be your one-stop shop for info relating to this obscure Animation Magic platformer!

Sections:

Info Table -- Early Intro -- Release Date ""Investigation"" -- Sprite Guides -- Lisa Simpson -- List of Functions

Links:

PA's Manual + Disc Scans -- PA's Spriters' Resource Page -- PA's TCRF Page

Info Table

Developer	Publisher	Release Date
Animation Magic, Inc.	Compact Disc Incorporated	1996
CD Mastering Code	Genre(s)	Players
W.O. 515723-2 S.O. 515723 DISC MFG., INC.	Action-Adventure Platformer Edutainment	1P
DVC optional - only needed to play intro cutscene

Early Intro

One of the main reasons (and possibly the only reason?) why Pyramid Adventures requires the Philips CD-i's Digital Video Cartridge is its rather compressed MPEG intro cutscene. While Animation Magic is no stranger to having MPEG cutscenes in their CD-i titles (see Mutant Rampage: Bodyslam), it's a bit of an oddity given the 1993 copyright date on the game's cover and Dash Daniels' VA being the same as Link's. Both of these facts imply that the game was co-developed alongside TFoE and TWoG, before the DVC was even released. This begs the question; was this cutscene originally uncompressed and running on a base CD-i?
As it turns out, the answer is yes:

Early Intro	Final Intro

The data of Pyramid Adventures contains an early version of the game's intro that's stored in the same format as Animation Magic's "uncompressed" cutscenes - this includes separate animation/background layers, pixel-accurate graphics, and its audio (split across several chunks)! This was, in all likelihood, the original intro for the game before the DVC switch.

However, the early intro has several palette mistakes and missing things that were corrected/added to the final cutscene:

The early intro has a stationary background, while the final cutscene moves it around (and shows off-screen details too, especially during Antu's scene). On the plus side, there is a unique black void-hiding border that was lost in the final intro.
The palette used for the animation had its colors tweaked. Objects such as Yam's dress and Dash's overalls were given lighter colors, while Tofu's usekh (that necklace/collar thing he wears) was changed from pink to purple.
Extra detail was added to Tofu's mouth.
There are two erroneous colors in the early palette. One of the yellows is purple - affecting Mozart's eyes and Yam's jewelry - while the pinkish-purple used for Antu's lip highlights is orange.
In the early intro, Dash's hat and hair change color to orange and purple when Yam appears. This was mostly fixed in the final cutscene - his hat still changed color, but only for a single frame.
The audio itself is missing sound effects and plays at a lower sample rate.

Release Date ""Investigation""

Pyramid Adventures is a bit odd in that its physical covers contain two different copyright dates - the back cover has 1993, while the disc itself has 1995. All of the other CD-i games covered on this site have consistent copyright dates, even Zelda's Adventure. Other than further indicating a delay between the game's development and release, this inconsistency raises a good question. Was Pyramid Adventures released in 1993, or 1995?

It's neither. The latest files on the disc are dated to December 18th, 1995 - very close to the end of the year:

Given how close these dates are to the end of the year (plus the time it takes to properly master, package, and release a CD), it's very unlikely that Pyramid Adventures was released in 1995. A 1996 release year is more likely, especially as a retrospective presentation on the game confirmed (at 18:35) that it was being finished around the time that Philips was pulling the plug on the CD-i. For America, this would have been around early 1996.

(The aforementioned presentation also reveals at ~22:00 that Pyramid Adventures was commercially sold through the last US CD-i catalog released - it was specifically targeted for schools and general health education.)

Sprite Guides

Some of the spritesheets used in Pyramid Adventures start with "guides" that help indicate what direction the character/enemy should be facing, as can be seen with Aunt Olivia's spritesheet. These guides are designed for the movement animations, as their frames are always after the guides and follow the same directional format.

The pelican enemy is a bit special as it has a leftover diagram of its animation cycle, with a note indicating to raise its fourth movement sprite by 21 pixels. Fair, given how much the pelican's body is offset by its wings in that one frame.

Other than being a neat piece of unused content, the guides are interesting in that they might be unique to this game. Mutant Rampage doesn't have them, and it's unknown if the Zelda titles (which - keep in mind - were developed around the same time as Pyramid Adventures) have them. Or maybe they do and these guides aren't unique in any way.

Lisa Simpson

There's a strange file path name within pyrgame, the main executable file of Pyramid Adventures. Located at hex addresses 21A6A and 227B9 are the following paths:

    LISA_SIMPSON:PYRAMID:SRC:maze.c
    null.  f:%s, l:%d
    
    LISA_SIMPSON:PYRAMID:SRC:phases.c
    null.  f:%s, l:%d

These paths are interesting as they reveal that Pyramid Adventures was coded in C using an OS that indicated directories with colons instead of slashes (a Macintosh?). But that's not really why they're on this page... apparently, Animation Magic (or Compact Disc Inc.) had at least one computer named after a member of the Simpson family. Either that, or it's an employee with a rather unfortunate name.

List of Functions

This topic is way too long to fit into this mini-article on the game. So...

View the functions of Pyramid Adventures here!

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Last updated: December 8th, 2024.