Adventure Games
3rd April 2001
My first programming love was adventure games, and they're maybe still
the area that excites me the most. For anyone who doesn't know what I
mean by the term ``adventure games'', I'm talking about text-only
problem-solving games, where you move a charcter through an imaginary
world with commands like GO NORTH, GET KEY and
UNLOCK DOOR.
I cut my teeth on the primitive but atmospheric
Scott Adams games
running on a TRS-80; much later I got to play excruciatingly slow
Commodore 64 implementations of the classic
Infocom games
including the legendary Zork trilogy. (If you don't remember this far
back, Commodore's absurdly large 1541-series
51/4-inch floppy drive was connected
to the computer by a serial lead - yes, really - which didn't help the
performance.)
Entranced by the original Scott Adams Adventureland (``You're
in a forest. You can also see: trees''), I wanted to write my own
adventures from the moment I knew the fundamentals of BASIC
programming. In the quarter-century since that fatal first encounter,
I've written part or all of twenty-five adventure games.
This area of my web site is dedicated to those games. Yes, this is
an insanely egotistical, navel-gazing exercise, and no, I don't
imagine it will be interesting to many people apart from me. That
said, I'm sure there are other people who, like me, enjoy wallowing in
the nostalgia of 1980s ``classic gaming''.
Here's what I've got, sort of in chronological order:
- a list of all my adventure games, in
chronological order, with descriptions and historical notes.
- My second commercial game,
Nosferatu,
including a hacked copy, a link to the emulator you
need to play it, maps, solutions and trivia. (Nothing about
my first game, Magic Mirror, yet.)
- Stuff about my most successful commercial game,
The Causes of Chaos.
- An endearingly naive article that I wrote in 1987 about
how to write adventure games in
BASIC. Ah, the simplicity of it all.
- A source-code distribution
for the horribly ugly and incomplete
prototype adventure
which was my first serious attempt to use a language other
than BASIC.
- Stuff about MUNDI, my first true
multi-user game, which may have been the first ever to run
over the internet; including the source code (which I'm sort
of embarrassed about, but there you go.)
- Herring, the game I've been
working on for the last decade, on or off (mostly off). Now
(June 2001) reborn in a dramatically different form!
- sac, the Scott Adams Compiler: a very
simple system for producing simple adventure Games, which I
made primarily so my eight-year-old son Danny can use it.
More to come ...