[HN Gopher] The Plot of the Phantom, a text adventure that took ...
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The Plot of the Phantom, a text adventure that took 40 years to
finish
Author : SeenNotHeard
Score : 171 points
Date : 2025-06-27 17:50 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (scottandrew.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (scottandrew.com)
| bravesoul2 wrote:
| Had a quick play and it's fun, quirky, well written. I might just
| get into this. Damn rat!
| apples_oranges wrote:
| I wonder what "quick play" means in 2025 with our short
| attention spans
| gbraad wrote:
| ... I thought he took 40 years to finish playing it. :-D
| noisy_boy wrote:
| From a serial procrastinator, kudos and best of luck!
| BryanLegend wrote:
| Did George RR Martin write it?
| jl6 wrote:
| No, it's finished.
| ThinkingGuy wrote:
| I was there in the 1980s; writing your own Infocom-style text
| adventure games was a common project among my peers. There are
| probably lots of unfinished (or even finished-but-unshared) games
| out there on old floppy disks in closets.
|
| I have a couple of my own, now archived on my home server.
| frost_knight wrote:
| Willing to share them?
| ThinkingGuy wrote:
| I would be, if they weren't so embarrassingly bad!
| kevindamm wrote:
| I also have a few of those from the 80s but only as notes
| written on sheets of paper (including many pages of hand-
| written BASIC and sometimes in various shorthands) because my
| Atari 800 did not have a cassette drive peripheral with which
| to save them.
|
| They were fun when they ran for 15-20 minutes, even after
| keying them in for hours.
| vunderba wrote:
| Nice job. I think it might be worth adding a few more verb
| synonyms to make the parser a little bit less strict - what's a
| few more years of development. :)
|
| Like many other devs I also dipped my feet in the world of
| interactive fiction. As a kid I was just learning about concepts
| such as inheritance / OOP / etc. so I went a bit overboard on the
| ontology.
|
| I remember pretty early on making a rather large mistake in that
| regard when a friend who was beta-testing the game for me at the
| time typed in commands like "get key", "get sword", "get ye
| flask", and then "get Aldwin" to which the game merrily replied
| "OK" and promptly stuffed an entire human being into the player's
| inventory.
| paulgerhardt wrote:
| Heh. I remember similarly spending a few hours inside
| LambdaMOO. Successfully managed to clone myself, put myself in
| my clone's pocket, and then put my clone in my own pocket and
| kind of broke room reversal. It was only later I discovered
| this was an intentional mechanic/bug that some designers that
| used to create very, very difficult puzzles.
|
| Weird things happen when you give your MOO players a REPL in
| LISP land.
| amiga386 wrote:
| I once wrote an (Amylaar LPC) enemy who, if you attacked him
| and he was near death, would summon two comrades to fight for
| him.
|
| Unfortunately, they're immediately hostile so you start
| attacking them too, and _they_ get near death and summon two
| comrades each, and so on. It turns into a _Sorcerer 's
| Apprentice_ scenario very quickly.
|
| I managed to bring the MUD to a halt. An archwizard (not Yen
| Sid) had to instakill the enemies to avoid hitting their
| "near death" condition and creating more of them.
| drewolbrich wrote:
| I remember writing one of these and typing "put bag in bag" and
| then being confused why the bag disappeared from the world.
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| Should have done it the other way around
| itsbenweeks wrote:
| Much better to have the world disappear from the bag.
| kevindamm wrote:
| put bag in bag of "things which do not contain itself"
| dp-hackernews wrote:
| Russell's Paradox:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_paradox
| reactordev wrote:
| This was a long running bug with merc based muds. The logic
| was to scan the room items first which cased the bug. Later
| versions would scan corpses first, then self, then room.
| janeway wrote:
| Wow, already stumbled into some good humour. Well done
| alienbaby wrote:
| I spent a bit of time using PAWS on an amstrad pcw to pen my own
| text adventure masterpiece.
|
| It's probably still down there packed up in the cellar ....
|
| Maybe I should dig it out again.
| Nevermark wrote:
| As a kid, the first text adventure I encountered with "The Cave"
| a text-choice game created by another student in the same town I
| lived. Our common teacher had created a "Computer Club"
| newsletter, to share programs between schools.
|
| Then at a junior college I encountered Adventure, Zork (the full
| version), Mystery Mansion, and Warp on an HP 3000/terminal mini-
| computer system.
|
| I began writing text adventures myself, bigger and bigger, and
| with higher and higher ambitions in terms of complexity, story
| and world scope, parsing. My "Command English" parser was an
| incredibly versatile subset of English.
|
| At home I had an IBM Jr (Hey, I loved it!), whose BASIC didn't
| have GOSUB, so I invented a stack for the parser using strings.
| (Used strings as a heap in another program to create a very slow
| 3D vector graphics program.)
|
| In high school I wrote this massive text adventure called
| Wanderer. I was so proud of it, until the day I went to save it
| on my floppy disk, at which time it wrote all over the previous
| version only to abort because it was to big for the disk. No pre-
| write size check! :(
|
| That was the last one I wrote. But by pushing every text
| adventure to new levels of capability, over and over, I learned a
| lot about programming, and developed a habit of innovating in
| program styles, and domain languages, to match problems.
|
| I wish I had the source for all those programs, but these were
| the days of many incompatible computers, and storage media that
| decayed quickly.
|
| ---
|
| I would love a Mac version of those four text adventures
| mentioned above. Mystery Mansion seems to have become
| particularly forgotten.
|
| ---
|
| "The Plot of the Phantom" makes me so happy! Thank you Scott
| Andrew!!!
|
| (Completely random, but reading the opening scene, it struck me
| how perverse it would be to get deeply into the game and find out
| I was in the text adventure equivalent of "Deliverance"! That
| would almost be art, lol. Like novels, text adventures are a
| medium that naturally supports much greater freedom, than visual
| mediums.)
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| I know Adventure exists via homebrew on the Mac via the open-
| adventure package. There are a bunch of Z-machine options for
| Zork.
| spauldo wrote:
| I had the same thing happen - lost my text adventure because it
| grew too large. That spurred me to figure out a better way of
| writing text adventures. I thought my solution of using a
| single parser and parallel array for game data was pretty
| innovative. I was 12 at the time and didn't have access to any
| magazines that had game source in them, so I didn't know any
| better.
| ninetyninenine wrote:
| LLMs can enhance text adventures.
|
| I'm not saying having LLMs narrate the entire situation. I'm
| saying have the LLM sit between gamestate and the player. The LLM
| is the UI.
|
| Essentially the LLM can see the current game state and possible
| moves and it's the LLMs job to change the game state and report
| the current game state to the user (via a well written
| narrative).
|
| That keeps the world consistent and structured, but the LLM adds
| enough dynamism to keep it flowing well. You can even make the
| underlying game state complex as well. Like you can have enemy
| AI's that actually move through the world too (independent of the
| LLM).
| SeenNotHeard wrote:
| There have been attempts, the results were not promising:
|
| https://intfiction.org/t/first-full-game-available-on-new-ll...
| ninetyninenine wrote:
| It looks as if the problem for this one was a game design
| issue. They had the LLM be sarcastic and ignore well known
| adventure game prompts on purpose. It's an easy fix to make
| the LLM more obedient and polite.
|
| The biggest issue is attempts to hack the LLM, to get at
| hidden gamestate. But I feel this can be easily remedied by
| just not providing the LLM with hidden game state.
| anthk wrote:
| Even Inform6 with the English library running under a Pentium
| would run circles over llm's. They aren't even close. If7 will
| curb-stomp it.
|
| NPC's running around were a thing even in the 80's, see The
| Hobbit. That on a ZX spectrum. 8 bit CPU, 48k of RAM. With if6
| and Zmachine games for 16 bit and 32 bit computers in the 90's
| llm's can't even compete.
|
| From Jigsaw, Anchorhead, Curses, Spider and Web to that anagram
| word puzzle game for Glulx (a 32 bit zmachine cousin), the
| array of amateur but professional looking games it's huge,
| really huge.
| ninetyninenine wrote:
| How? The LLM is in agentic mode and pulling and pushing the
| switches of the game. I don't see how these engines can curb
| stomp it.
| Pet_Ant wrote:
| Tangentially related, I remember reading about an ancient still
| being developed adventure game. It was from Eastern Europe
| (former Yugoslavia, I want to say) about being trapped in a
| prison that had crazy amounts of depth and consequences. One of
| them being something like picking up a random unused condom on
| the floor will result in the pregnancy of another character in a
| later chapter. I've searched for it again and can't find it, and
| I couldn't have dreamed it up.
|
| Anyone know the game?
| matthewsinclair wrote:
| This is amazing. Replace "Atari 800" with "TI 99/4a" (and the
| fact that he eventually finished the game) and you have the story
| of my early life as a programmer! Well done for shipping. That's
| the hardest thing of all to do!
| scoot wrote:
| "That's not a verb I recognise." (So. Many. Times!)
|
| Sorry, but that isn't a verb recognition problem, it's a
| comprehension problem. I agree with the downvoted poster that LLM
| integration would significantly improve the end user experience.
| However the LLM should not be arbiter of game state (as they
| suggested), but simply the translator that ensures that the
| players instructions are understood by the game.
| scoot wrote:
| I'm imagining the application of text adventures specifically
| designed for second language learning. Quite the possibilities!
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(page generated 2025-06-30 23:00 UTC)