[HN Gopher] My 1981 adventure game is now a multimedia extravaganza
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My 1981 adventure game is now a multimedia extravaganza
Author : vontzy
Score : 42 points
Date : 2026-02-16 22:35 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (technologizer.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (technologizer.com)
| technothrasher wrote:
| "In high school, I loved playing text-based TRS-80 adventure
| games written by Scott Adams. Moved to write an Adams-style
| adventure myself, I set it in the Arctic."
|
| So many of us growing up at that time were inspired by Adams. I
| think he quite literally is responsible for a huge number of
| people becoming programmers and game designers. I was lucky
| enough a few years ago to be able to thank him personally for
| what he did for me as a kid. He was very gracious and humbly
| admitted that he gets that a lot.
| agiacalone wrote:
| I count myself among this group. I actually emailed Adams
| sometime around 1999 or so to ask him a question about a game
| that I _thought_ was his. Turns out, the game was included in a
| collection of Adams 's games on the TI-994a (the game was
| called Knight Ironheart) and was in the same exact style and
| used the same interpreter as his own games.
|
| He was super nice about it, explaining that he didn't actually
| author that game. We exchanged a few more emails back and
| forth, but overall a great experience chatting with him over
| the earlyish Internet. I feel very fortunate that I grew up in
| an era of computing where it seemed much smaller than it does
| today.
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| I have a fuzzy memory of Adventureland and Pirate Island for
| the 99/4. What delightful times!
| wrongcards wrote:
| I taught myself to program typing out games and apps from
| Rainbows magazines in the mid-eighties. I was obsessed with
| text-adventures, and creating my own, from about age eight and
| onward.
|
| Playing games back then was a wildly different experience; pre-
| internet, there was no way to find hints. You'd come to a wall,
| somehow, and be stuck. I never got to the end of Raaka-Tu, or
| Madness and the Minotaur, or Bedlam. I wasn't even ten-years-
| old, and those games were an impossible undertaking.
|
| That said, in 2021, finally got to the end of the first
| graphical RPG I ever played, Dungeons of Daggorath, and killed
| the final wizard. I was absurdly pleased with myself that day.
| That goddamn wizard had been a regret-tinged concern of mine
| for 39 years.
| dsiegel2275 wrote:
| Very nice and I just did the exact same thing recently!
|
| When I was in first or second grade (circa 1982) our family got a
| TRS-80 Model 3 and I started learning BASIC on it. I built a
| bunch of small little programs and even started an ambitious
| project: a full text adventure game called "Manhole Mania!". You,
| as the player, were a public works employee sent into the sewers
| to investigate strange noises. I never made much progress, maybe
| only a few rooms.
|
| Just a couple of weeks ago I had the idea of just pointing Codex
| CLI at my unfinished game idea and "one-shotting" it. I wrote a
| fairly detailed prompt, constrained it to use Elm and to make it
| a static website. Gave a rough outline of a simple, but playable
| Manhole Mania. 5 mins, 43 seconds later:
|
| https://manhole-mania.com/
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| Ack! There's a timer! I have to think fast!
| zem wrote:
| one of the very first text adventures I played as a kid
| [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_Kingdom_Valley] had static
| illustrations; I've always thought of it as a nice touch to add
| to a text adventure. they key difference between that and more
| modern graphic (or hybrid text/graphic) adventures was that the
| illustrations were not meant to be informative; you couldn't look
| at them and find objects to interact with, e.g., they were just
| there to add to the mood.
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| I remember seeing "Choose Your Own Adventures" early in the 80s
| and thinking "Hmm.. Zork sure would be cool if it had a few
| pictures like the CYOA books." And of course, about a month
| later I saw the first text adventure with illustrations. I
| don't think I ever played Twin Kingdom Valley, but after
| reading the wikipedia page, I sort of want to now. Oh... aha!
|
| https://archive.org/details/d64_Twin_Kingdom_Valley_1987_Bug...
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| This is awesome. Several years ago I found the print-out of an
| adventure game I wrote in my youth and modified it a bit to work
| with Chipmunk Basic. It wasn't NEARLY as full featured as Artic
| Adventure, but this is quite motivating. I'll have to find some
| time to port the bits of my space adventure to something that can
| run in a web page.
|
| https://meadhbh.hamrick.rocks/v2/retro_computing/sundog_dot_...
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| Also... I remembered this existed and might be of interest to
| people reading the comments here. It's the December 1980 issue of
| Byte Magazine, archived at the Internet Archive.
|
| https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1980-12
|
| This is the "Adventure" issue, complete with a source listing of
| Scott Adam's Pirate's Adventure and a Robert Tinney cover
| illustration. Plus, reviews of commercial games and articles
| describing the state of the art 46 years ago. Worth a read if
| you're hip to interactive fiction.
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