[HN Gopher] Inventing the Adventure Game (1984)
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Inventing the Adventure Game (1984)
Author : CaesarA
Score : 45 points
Date : 2025-05-09 18:37 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.warrenrobinett.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.warrenrobinett.com)
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Recursively a thread from 2019:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21896227
|
| Including:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21897355
|
| dang on Dec 28, 2019 | parent | context | favorite | on: Robot
| Odyssey (1984)
|
| A thread from 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17421175
|
| 2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7118649
|
| DonHopkins on Dec 28, 2019 | parent | context | favorite | on:
| Robot Odyssey (1984)
|
| Dag nabbit dang, you beat me to it! That 2018 thread about Robot
| Odyssey Online had a link to a Slate article mentioned some stuff
| about Alan Kay's high regard for Robot Odyssey, who somebody
| quoted, then he posted a correction to the article himself, and I
| posted some other discussions about it with him as well (and some
| links to other papers about related stuff by Chaim Gingold, Kurt
| Schmucker, and Dan Ingalls). Robot Odyssey was brilliant and
| waaaay before its time, and as Alan Kay said: Warren Robinette is
| a very special designer! He was the creator of one of the first
| known easter eggs in a video game: Atari Adventure, released in
| 1979 on the Atari 2600.
|
| (I happen to be wearing my Factorio t-shirt right now! That's
| another robophilic game too, notoriously known as "programmer
| crack".)
|
| >nlawalker on June 29, 2018 [-]
|
| >From the Slate article: "When Teri Perl described the project to
| legendary computer scientist Alan Kay, he said, "You're wasting
| your time. It can't be done." That is, the basic idea was simply
| too complex to run on an Apple home computer. When Robot Odyssey
| shipped, the company gave Wallace a plaque that said, "It can't
| be done. --Alan Kay.""
|
| >That's an awesome story.
|
| >alankay1 on June 29, 2018 [-]
|
| >An "awesome story" that isn't the way it happened (as with too
| many "awesome stories"). See the comment I made (posted below by
| niawalker). To summarize here, I said I love "Rocky's Boots", and
| I love the basic idea of "Robot Odyssey", but for end-users,
| using simple logic gates to program multiple robots in a
| cooperative strategy game blows up too much complexity for very
| little utility. A much better way to do this would be to make a
| "next Logo" that would allow game players to make the AI brains
| needed by the robots. So what I actually said, is that doing it
| the way you are doing it will wind up with a game that is not
| successful or very playable.
|
| >Just why they misunderstood what I said is a bit of a mystery,
| because I spelled out what could be really good for the game (and
| way ahead of what other games were doing). And of course it would
| work on an Apple II and other 8 bit micros (Logo ran nicely on
| them, etc.)
|
| >From: Alan Kay Date: Mon, 12 Nov 2007 13:55:27 -0800 (PST)
| Subject: Re: Just curious ... To: Samuel Klein, Don Hopkins,
| Chris Trottier, John Gilmore
|
| >Hi SJ --
|
| >Robot Odyssey is another game that would benefit from having a
| clean separation between the graphical/physical modeling
| simulation and the behavioral parts (both the games levels and
| the robot programming could be independently separated out) --
| this would make a great target for those who would like to try
| their hand at game play and at robot behavioral programming
| systems.
|
| >This is a long undropped shoe for me. When I was the CS at Atari
| in 82-84, it was one of our goals to make a number of the very
| best games into frameworks for end-user (especially children's)
| creativity. Alas, Atari had quite a down turn towards the end of
| 83 ... We did get "the Aquarium" idea from Ann Marion to morph
| into the Vivarium project at Apple ... And some of the results
| there helped with the later Etoys design.
|
| >Cheers,
|
| >Alan
|
| >From: Alan Kay Subject: Robot Odyssey
|
| >I actually argued with him [Will Wright] and Maxis for not
| making SimCity very educational. E.g. the kids can't open the
| hood to see the assumptions made by SimCity (crime can be
| countered by more police stations) and try other assumptions
| (raise standard of living to counter crime) etc. I've never
| thought of it as a particularly good design for educational
| purposes.
|
| >However, I have exactly the opposite opinion of Robot Odyssey,
| which I thought was a brilliant concept when the TLC people
| brought it to me at Atari in the early 80s. (Rocky's Boots is
| pretty much my all time favorite for a great game that really
| teaches and also has a terrific intro to itself done in itself,
| etc. Warren Robinette is a very special designer.).
|
| >The big problem with Robot Odyssey (as I tried to explain to
| them) was that the circuits-programming didn't scale to the game.
| They really needed to move to something like an object-oriented
| event-driven Logo with symbolic scripting to allow the kids to
| really get into the wonderful possibilities for strategies and
| tactics. (BTW, Etoys is kind of an OO event-driven Logo (not an
| accident), and the next version of it has as a goal to be able to
| do Robot Odyssey in a reasonable way. This got delayed because of
| funding problems but we now have funding and are really going to
| do it this year. Want to help design and build it?)
|
| >From: Alan Kay Date: Thu, 3 May 2018 07:49:16 +0000 (UTC)
| Subject: Re: Blocky + Micropolis = Blockropolis! ;)
|
| >Yes, all of these "blocks" editors sprouted from the original
| one I designed for Etoys* more than 20 years ago now -- most of
| the followup was by way of Jens Moenig -- who did SNAP. You can
| see Etoys demoed on the OLPC in my 2007 TED talk.
|
| >I'd advise coming up with a special kid's oriented language for
| your SimCity/Metropolis system and then render it in "blocks".
|
| >Cheers
|
| >Alan
|
| >------------- * Two precursors for DnD programming were in my
| grad student's -- Mike Travers -- MIT thesis (not quite the same
| idea), and in the "Thinking Things" parade programming system
| (again, just individual symbol blocks rather than expressions).
|
| >From: Don Hopkins Date: Fri, 4 May 2018 00:43:56 +0200 Subject:
| Re: Blocky + Micropolis = Blockropolis! ;)
|
| >I love fondly remember and love Thinkin' Things 1, but I never
| saw the subsequent versions!
|
| >But there's a great demo on youtube!
|
| https://youtu.be/gCFNUc10Vu8?t=24m58s
|
| >That would be a great way to program SimCity builder "agents"
| like the bulldozer and road layer, as well as agents like PacMan
| who know how to follow roads and eat traffic!
|
| Micropolis Online (SimCity) Web Demo (with PacMan following roads
| and eating traffic):
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8snnqQSI0GE
|
| >I am trying to get my head around Snap by playing around with it
| and watching Jens's youtube videos, and it's dawning on me that
| that it's full blown undiluted Scheme with continuations and
| visual macros plus the best ideas of Squeak! The concept of
| putting a "ring" around blocks to make them a first class
| function, and being able to define your own custom blocks that
| take bodies of block code as parameters like real Lisp macros is
| brilliant! That is what I've been dreaming about and wondering
| how to do for so long! Looks like he nailed it! ;)
|
| >Here's something I found that you wrote about tile programming
| six years ago.
|
| >-Don
|
| >Squeak-dev:
|
| http://squeak-dev.squeakfoundation.narkive.com/7ZN0H3vt/etoy...
|
| >Etoys, Alice and tile programming ajbn at cin.ufpe.br () 6 years
| ago
|
| >Folks,
|
| >I have been trying the new version of Alice <www.alice.org>. It
| also uses tile programming like Etoys.Just for curiosity, does
| anyone know the history of Tile Programming? TIA,
|
| >Antonio Barros PhD Student Informatics Center Federal University
| of Pernambuco Brazil
|
| >Alan Kay 6 years ago
|
| >This particular strand starting with one of the projects I saw
| in the CDROM "Thinking Things" (I think it was the 3rd in the
| set). This project was basically about being able to march around
| a football field and the multiple marchers were controlled by a
| very simple tile based programming system. Also, a grad student
| from a number of years ago, Mike Travers, did a really excellent
| thesis at MIT about enduser programming of autonomous agents --
| the system was called AGAR -- and many of these ideas were used
| in the Vivarium project at Apple 15 years ago. The thesis version
| of AGAR used DnD tiles to make programs in Mike's very powerful
| system.
|
| >The etoys originated as a design I did to make a nice
| constructive environment for the internet -- the Disney
| Family.com site -- in which small projects could make by parents
| and kids working together. SqC made the etoys ideas work, and Kim
| Rose and teacher BJ Conn decided to see how they would work in a
| classroom. I thought the etoys lacked too many features to be
| really good in a classroom, but I was wrong. The small number of
| features and the ease of use turned out to be real virtues.
|
| >We've been friends with Randy Pausch for a long time and have
| had a number of outstanding interns from his group at CMU over
| the years. For example, Jeff Pierce (now a prof at GaTech) did
| SqueakAlice working with Andreas Raab to tie it to Andreas'
| Balloon3D. Randy's group got interested in the etoys tile
| scripting and did a very nice variant (it's rather different from
| etoys, and maybe better).
|
| >Cheers,
|
| >Alan
|
| Warren Robinett:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Robinett
|
| Rocky's Boots:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocky%27s_Boots
|
| Robot Odyssey:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_Odyssey
|
| Here's The Programming Game You Never Asked For:
|
| https://blog.codinghorror.com/heres-the-programming-game-you...
|
| The Hardest Computer Game of All Time: It was called Robot
| Odyssey, it took me 13 years to finish it, and it sealed my fate
| as a programmer.
|
| http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2014/01/rob...
|
| Chaim Gingold's Gadget Background Survey:
|
| http://chaim.io/download/Gingold%20(2017)%20Gadget%20(1)%20S...
|
| A Taxonomy of Simulation Software:
|
| http://www.donhopkins.com/home/documents/taxonomy.pdf
|
| The Fabrik Programming Environment:
|
| http://www.donhopkins.com/home/Fabrik%20PE%20paper.pdf
| corysama wrote:
| A different look at the program structure of Adventure
| https://benfry.com/distellamap/ ;)
| haolez wrote:
| Man, I played so much of Adventure in my Atari 2600 that I had
| dreams of this game. I dreamt that I was playing levels that
| didn't exist. It was fascinating at the time. It was a unique
| experience, almost psychedelic :D
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