Text adventure game with a canary and a dragon

The Game Room
1

The other day, I was visiting with some friends, and the topic of Zork came up. One of my friends made a reference to “the part with the canary and the dragon”. Apparently there was some part where you had to get past a dragon, and the only way to do it was to have already found the birdcage with the canary: If you let the bird out in the dragon’s room, it would fly into the dragon’s face and chase it away.

Except that I’ve played all the way through all five games of the Zork trilogy, and the only dragon in any of them follows you into a glacier room, melts the glacier, and then drowns. So it’s not Zork.

OK, well, there are a lot of other text adventure games: Obviously he was remembering some other one. But none of us has been able to search up what it was. Does it ring a bell for anyone?

2

I feel like I remember this - is it in the original “Adventure” (colossal cave)?

3

That was my first guess, too, but this walkthrough doesn’t say anything about a canary, and while there’s a dragon, you apparently defeat it with your bare hands

4

I found a clue.

“…that allowed anyone with some billable CPU cycles and a TTY keyboard to examine and interact with a simple virtual world in which a seemingly endless set of branching decisions led one into the great cave, to the canary and its cage, and on to confrontations with monsters, labyrinthine paths, and virtual treasures…”

5

It does say something about a bird in a cage, though:

Level 1 is pretty easy. You start at the Hall of Mists. Head south and grab the gold (+7 score, +9 to drop off). Head north. Hall of the Mountain King, with a snake. Open the cage so the bird drives away the snake. OK, passages in all directions.

I think the friend was misremembering the snake as a dragon.

6

Yes, the bird was to chase away the snake.

And you couldn’t get the bird if you had the rod with the start in your possession.

Also, if you sicced the bird on the dragon, the bird would be burnt to a crisp.

To kill the dragon. You typed “> Kill dragon”.

The game would say “With what? Your bare hands?”

You then type “> Yes”

And voila, dead dragon. You then “> Take rug”.

7

I’m guessing that’s probably it. I’ve asked him, let’s see if he gets back to me on it.

8

Yeah, he thinks that probably was it. And the word “xyzzy” sounded familiar to him, so it’s likely that he did play adv at one time.