I was wondering if anyone might be able to help me identify a computer game I remember playing in college, in 78-79.
My recollection of the game is extremely vague. We played it at the UofI on networked computers in the basement of our dorm. It was text only. I recall it being quite similar to dungeons and dragons, in that you would be presented with a scenario to which you would respond with either a movement or action, and then the computer would tell you what happened after that reaction. This level of usability was quite impressive seeing that our CS courses involved typing Fortran commands on punch cards!
The only specific action I know I recall from this game was that at one point near the end I believe you were required to release a (mechanical?) bird to key the developments that would allow you to progress. The game involved a single “quest”, which I remember we successfully completed after some time.
Any thoughts?
If you are aware of any on-line sources discussing such games, I would be happy to go there and see if anything stirs the grey matter.
Thanks.
Did a little searching myself (which I should have done before posting) and saw both the names “Adventure” and “Zork.” The opening scene (The end of the Road) is definitely the right vibe, whether or not it is the exact game. Looks like I have a way to avoid working this cloudy Friday!
If you remember, “You’re in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike”, then you were playing colossal cave. I loved that game - even the nasty little dwarf who would jump out and throw things at you.
Yeah, that was it.
It was a thrill to find something like this on the computer, at the same time folks were playing D&D and exploring the steam tunnels.
I think I played this game as “Adventure” (as mentioned in the Wiki article). If that’s the same game, I remember two things about it:
To put something down, you used the phrase “Drop XXXX”. One of the treasures you collected during the course of the game was “a delicate Ming vase” and another was a pillow. If at any time you dropped the Ming vase without dropping the pillow first, you were told “the Ming vase shatters with a delicate crash”. If you remembered to drop the pillow first, then the vase landed safely on the pillow.
Early in the game, you found an axe. When the dwarf showed up, the only way to stop him was to throw the axe at him, which would either kill him or drive him away. In either case, you had to remember to pick up the axe again, which would be lying on the ground. One time I didn’t have the axe and when the dwarf started showing up I got suffiently annoyed that I typed “Fuck the dwarf”. The response? “There is no dwarf here.”
There were actually seven dwarves. As in “Snow White and the…”
What annoyed me most was that throwing the axe at them could miss. And then you’d have to take another turn to get the thing again, only to throw it again. Meanwhile the dwarf is tossing some ranged weapon like daggers or such, and although he tended to miss more than you did, if he hits you it’s game over. And since the original version didn’t let you save multiple games and deleted every saved game upon load, you’d have to restart the entire game. One of the stupidest mechanics in any game ever.
I played Colossal Cave as Adventure in '72 or '73. This was at college, and someone had discovered computer terminals that could be used in off-hours. The game was sort of a protected secret, as were the computers. But when I learned that you could “message” total strangers in other campus buildings, in real time, that became the game we came to play. I never got too far in Adventure, due to not getting much time on computer, but I think of the game often, as my first real introduction to computing. Later I became a programmer.
When in a maze of corridors, I still say I’m in a twisty maze of passages, all alike. IIRC there was also a bird, pining for the fjords.
I had the source to this thing once. IIRC, it had an engine and a big text file it used to look up the description of the locations.
There was another dnd non-Adventure game from a long time ago called Rogue, similar to nethack, which I never played. That wasn’t text, but played in a full screen but multilevel maze. PLATO had a number of similar games in the mid-70s, including a MUD.
You can find rogue downloads with a little, hah, digging. It’s still a great way to pass the odd five minutes (and mindbogglingly hard to win at without cheating).
I played Colossal Cave when I was in college. I knew I had one of the downloads so I just tried it out. It seems to work okay except for the fact that it doesn’t seem to understand the word ‘verbose’ even though it’s in the read.me file.
I’m running Windows XP with SP2 and I downloaded the “Kevin Black’s DOS version of his and Bob Supnik’s DECUS version, available as a DOS executable.” The file is “adv350kb.zip”.
Once I unziped it, it created a Colossal Cave sub-directory. In that directory I just double-clicked on adv.bat and it’s running in a DOS window.
I would guess that any of the other DOS versions would work the same way.
I played “Adventure” with my Dad (technology consultant to Apple, CNN, Disney, etc.) for hours and hours. We kept notebooks of where we were going and the stuff we had.
He passed away about ten years ago and every now and then I notice those notebooks are still in there. I can’t bear to throw them away.
I actually used to make a decent amount of pocket change rescuing Telengard characters for people by manually editing the character back to life in the basic code on C=64’s.
HAHAHA on “fuck the dwarf.” I used to enjoy games by Scott Adams. One in particular, similar to Collosal Cave, had your passage along a cliff face blocked by a bear. The parsers of the day only recognized the first 3 letters of a command. Like you, lots of players got frustrated trying to get past the bear and eventually typed the command “Screw the bear.” The response was “the bear is so startled that it falls of the cliff.” Well, in the early 90’s this was quite risque and the players looked for clarification. Turns out the “correct” phrase was “scream at the bear” but needless to say, “scream” was never used again. Scott’s parser also picked up on most profanities and responded with suitable admonishments.
You can still find him on the net at Scott Adams Grand Adventures (SAGA) if you want to try your hand at some of these older text games and if you’re really up for some serious late night self-flagellation, Zork I, II and III are all freeware now. Infocom - Zork Downloads
