[HN Gopher] Arctic Adventure: A Lost 1981 TRS-80 Adventure Game
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       Arctic Adventure: A Lost 1981 TRS-80 Adventure Game
        
       Author : throwup238
       Score  : 26 points
       Date   : 2024-01-31 19:00 UTC (3 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.arctic81.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.arctic81.com)
        
       | rendall wrote:
       | I didn't follow all of the links, but did not see one that
       | obviously linked to the source code. I'd like to take a look at
       | it. Anyone else find it?
        
         | throw-away_42 wrote:
         | Looking at the page source, it's in /aaweb.bas
        
       | technothrasher wrote:
       | Around this same time, also inspired by Scott Adams (who I got to
       | thank personally a couple years ago for getting me interested in
       | programming), I played around with making text adventures on the
       | Apple II machines at my elementary school. I never actually made
       | a complete game, but it taught me a lot about BASIC. The year
       | after I graduated from that school, I was back there for some
       | reason, and some of the kids where playing the games I wrote.
       | When I told them I'd written them, they asked me how to solve the
       | "UNDEF'D STATEMENT" puzzle. I felt bad.
        
         | actionfromafar wrote:
         | HAhahaha! Your program crashed?! What a weird mix of pride and
         | embarrasment that must've been! I can feel it my bones.
        
           | technothrasher wrote:
           | It wasn't even so much a crash as a "ran out of program". The
           | code was pretty simplistic and was basically "player selects
           | option 1, goto line 10, option 2, goto line 20." They
           | selected option 2 and there was no line 20. That's
           | simplifying a bit, but that's basically what happened.
        
         | AdmiralAsshat wrote:
         | Obviously you should've just told the player they found a
         | secret instead:
         | 
         | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9bkKw32dGw
        
         | delichon wrote:
         | Not the Dilbert Scott Adams:
         | https://www.mobygames.com/person/19676/scott-adams/
        
         | Brian_K_White wrote:
         | There's a file somewhere in one of the trs-80 model 100
         | archives that has a name like sexy.ba (filenames are 6.2 and
         | .ba is basic)
         | 
         | When you run it it gives some generic "are you ready to have
         | fun?" kind of message, but then crashes. But it's BASIC so you
         | just go to the crashed line and fix a typo. Run, crashes a few
         | lines later, you fix something slightly trickier like an array
         | index out of range, run,... 3 or 4 of those total and it just
         | ends "You learned how to debug and fix programs!
         | Congratulations! Wasn't that fun?"
         | 
         | I have to say I was actually unreasonably entertained, so hats
         | off to the author.
        
       | s1mon wrote:
       | I don't remember this game from back then, but I do remember
       | playing adventure games on the TRS-80 with my aunt being a very
       | formative experience. The TRS-80 was also one of my early
       | introductions to computer programming. I wish I had any records
       | of what code I wrote back then and I can imagine how good it must
       | have felt to be able to dig up and clean up the old code. I do
       | still have 5.25" floppies with a game I wrote in IBM PC Basic
       | somewhere. At one point I had rejection letters from Broderbund
       | and a bunch of other game publishers. It's a lot to deal with all
       | of that as a tween.
        
       | 7thaccount wrote:
       | I'm sad I missed this era, but enjoy playing modern interactive
       | fiction immensely.
        
       | miki_tyler wrote:
       | For some reason I read Penguin Adventure (from Konami) and got
       | really excited.
        
       | ChrisArchitect wrote:
       | (2021)
       | 
       | Some more anecdotes and discussion:
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28344635
        
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       (page generated 2024-01-31 23:00 UTC)