In the early 1980s, Brian Howarth created a series of text-based games called “Mysterious Adventures.” He took his inspiration from the role playing game Dungeons and Dragons, as well as a game show on the BBC called “The Adventure Game” (also inspired by D&D) which featured celebrities and a member of the public completing various challenges on the fictional planet of Arg.

One of the games Howarth created, the 1983 title “Perseus and Andromeda”, was built around ancient Greek myth. Perseus was a hero, the son of Zeus and the mortal woman Danea. In the myths, he killed the gorgon Medusa, turned the mighty titan Atlas to stone, and rescued the beautiful Andromeda from the horrid beast Cetus. Howarth took a variation on these stories and placed them in Scott Adams’s game engine (though it was later re-done in more complex form). In the original version, players used two word commands to guide Perseus through his adventures.

At the start of the game,  you are instructed by a king that your mission is to kill Medusa and rescue Andromeda. Many missions are completed by presenting a character with an item in exchange for another. For instance, early in the game Perseus meets a thirty beggar. Provide him with water, and he gives you a discus which is needed in a future puzzle. Other portions of the game require you to visit locations like the Temple of Athena, to pray at altars, or to simply sit and wait.

You eventually confront Medusa. After you have killed her, you must mount the flying horse Pegasus who will carry you to an Island of Rock. There you find Andromeda. Here, Howarth diverges from the original myth somewhat. Instead of rescuing Andromeda from Cetus, you must save her from the Kraken. Accomplish that, and the game is over.

What’s fascinating about the game is how it bridges eras, connecting the classical world with the digital world. While purists may cluck their tongue at art forms like the comic book or video game, titles like “Perseus and Andromeda” demonstrates how these art forms can help breathe new life into ancient tales.

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Now that we’ve got that settled, let’s double check the essentials. Do you have a towel with you? A towel is the most massively useful item an interstellar hitchhiker can carry. Next, find your copy of “The Best Vogon Poems of 1984.” Once you’ve got that, burn it and scatter the ashes where they’ll never be found. We can’t take any chances. If you’re panicking or don’t happen to have a towel on hand, I will wait while you settle down and pay a visit to your linen closet.

Now that that’s all taken care of, you’re finally ready to play The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the 1984 text-based adventure based on Douglas Adams’s six part trilogy. The game features you as Arthur Dent (though you occasionally perform actions as Ford Prefect, Zaphod Beeblebrox and Trillian), and vaguely follows the plot of the first book in the series, or at least meanders along side the original plot for a bit before venturing off on its own. As Dent, you narrowly escape the destruction of Earth, hitch a ride on a Vogon ship, endure terrible poetry, search for a legendary planet, and make a rather important cup of tea. You direct Arthur through these tasks by simple typed commands. Certain tasks and puzzles must be completed within a set number of turns or else the game will end. Over. Kaput. So long, and thanks for all the fish. Along the way, you discover the actual Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a book with a good deal of information that can help you solve some of the games’ puzzles.

One of the puzzles, the Babel Fish Puzzle, has become one of the most notorious gaming challenges of all time. The point of the puzzle was to catch the babel fish, which could translate any language once inserted into your ear. You captured the fish by arranging objects as the fish bounced about the room. Problematically, each solution introduced a whole slew of new difficulties.

As would be expected from a Douglas Adams story, the game had a few unique quirks. It would occasionally lie to you. One of your inventory items was “no tea”. Later, you could acquire tea. This would place you in the curious position of having tea and no tea at the same time. In order to resolve this existential conundrum, you drop your common sense. Another curious inventory item was a “thing your aunt gave you which you don’t know what it is.”

There were no graphics in the original release of the game (though some were added for the 20th and 30th anniversary re-releases). It debuted on a number of systems, including the Apple II, the Atari 8-bit, Amiga, Atari ST, and the Commodore 64. Developed and released by Infocom, it came with a number of “feelies,” unique promotional items that aimed to help the player dive fully into the world created in the game. The feelies included in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy were: a “Don’t Panic” button, a packet of pocket fluff, an order for the destruction of Arthur Dent’s house, a Vogon order for the destruction of Earth, Peril Sensitive Sunglasses, an official microscopic space fleet, and a brochure titled, “How Many Times Has This Happened To You?”

Designed by Douglas Adam and Steve Meretzky, the game remains a classic of the text based adventure genre, guaranteed to keep you entertained as you drift through the universe searching for the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.

https://youtu.be/6-KsB5r46uA

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George Lucas released the film Star Wars: A New Hope in 1977, beginning a pop culture phenomenon that continues to this day. People around the world latched on to the story of Luke Skywalker, Leia Organa, Han Solo, and the menacing Darth Vader. The film’s impact went far beyond the cinema, generating toys, books, video games, and more. For some fans, the film become a way of life.

Two years after the release of Star Wars, Lance Micklus gave the world Dog Star Adventure, a text based game for the TRS-80 microcomputer and inspired by the Star Wars franchise. It immediately made history when Micklus published the source code in the May 1979 issue of SoftSide Magazine (your BASIC software magazine). The article included a brief description of the game along with a bit of history. He cited the influence of the text based adventure game Colossal Cave Adventure, developed by William Crowther, which had been written in FORTRAN for the PDP-10 computer in 1976. A year later, Don Woods of Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory discovered the game and made a few enhancements.

Micklus was working at Vermont’s public television station (which used the University of Vermont’s computers) and discovered Crowther’s game. When the University computers were upgraded, Micklus lost access to Adventure and began writing his own game. He wrote Dog Star Adventure in BASIC 1 and based it on the first Star Wars movie. To avoid legal issues the names of characters were changed. Princess Leia’s name was changed to Leya, Darth Vader became General Doom, and the Death Star became…the Dog Star. Players were tasked with rescuing Leya. To complicate matters, Leya was wearing a necklace of “Shinestones”, one of which contained the strength and location of the “Freedom Forces” fighting the evil General Doom.

According to the “computer-puppet” hiding aboard Princess Leya’s ship:

“It’s possible, although very difficult, to save the day by rescuing the princess and recovering her necklace of Shinestones and the treasury of the Freedom Fighting Force. Even if we are unsuccessful, anything we can do to deter General Doom may help win a victory in the battle for peace in the galaxy.”

Players controlled the game by typing in simple instructions. For instance, to pick up an object the player typed “Get” plus whatever they wanted picked up. Players had to solve various puzzles and problems to beat the game, including one particularly memorable puzzle involving a hamburger. The player discovered a hamburger and later encountered a hungry robot. If too much time had elapsed between finding the hamburger and giving it to the robot, the burger was cold and the robot refused it. The robot attacked and the player died.

A year after the release of Dog Star Adventure, David Malmberg created a port to the Commodore PET. Malmberg worked as a business analyst, but was heavily involved in the emerging world of microcomputers. He held a firm belief in their teaching potential and had a love of text based gaming. In the PET version of the game many of the original Star Wars names returned (for instance, Doom once again became Darth Vader). The new version also added a character graphic of the Dark Lord of the Sith.

The game’s greatest legacy lay in the decision to publish its source code. While Don Woods had distributed his source code for Colossal Cave Adventure, Dog Star Adventure was the first to officially publish. As a result, the text based adventures which followed were largely built on the blocks first laid by Micklus and Dog Star.

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Screenshot of version created in C by James Gibbon. Courtesy of cc Wikimedia Commons

With the cancellation of the famed CBS sci-fi series in the late 1960s, Mayfield wanted to relive the adventures of the intrepid Enterprise and her crew. Acting as captain, the player monitored weapons payloads and fuel while scouring the universe in search of new planets, stranded ships, and starbases – all while clearing quadrants of Klingon invaders.

Although simple, Star Trek was remarkable for its open-access quality. Because of its simplicity, players could adapt the code to their liking. In fact, this game was one of many that populated the pages of countless “How-to” BASIC programming books that were popular at the time. It’s hard to believe that there was a time when Paramount’s lawyers would have overlooked (though for awhile the company openly condoned fan contributions to the Star Trek universe). Super Star Trek, the most successful version of this game, was one of those lucky enough to receive Paramount’s blessing, eventually selling over one million copies.

Star Trek and Super Star Trek would inspire many to pursue programming (I myself recall plugging away at BASIC Computer Games offerings). One of these would be Atari programmer Doug Neubauer, Attempting to recreate a more graphical version of the game, he would eventually create the lucrative title Star Raiders.

Taken from the Infocom text adventure A Mind Forever Voyaging, the command SUPERBRIEF displayed “the name of a place you have entered, even if you have never been there before.” It is also the title of Kristopher Purzycki’s weekly bit where he reflects upon the earliest PC games, their development, and their significance within the history of the medium.

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Although many early computer games had their start in stuffy and sterile MIT research labs, the people that created them often set out to recreate places that provided that same sense of belonging. One of the first computer games, Colossal Cave Adventure (or Adventure) was born of this sense. Accomplished caver and programmer Will Crowther created Adventure as a way to not only capture the awe of exploring Mammoth Cave, but also his love of Dungeons and Dragons. Additionally, the text-based adventure was a gift to his daughters during the aftermath of a recent divorce. Working with Crowther, Don Woods would expand Adventure in 1977, adding more of the fantasy elements that made the game so captivating.

“Screenshot of Will Crowther’s original Colossal Cave aka ADVENT (1975-76), running on a Windows computer. Image in Public Domain.

Available on numerous platforms today (including mobile), Adventure is a playful romp through an underworld inhabited by snakes, impious dwarves, and other oddball creatures. But it also captures much of the spirit that propelled early game development. Whether is was Mammoth Cave or Dungeons and Dragons, early developers like Crowther, Woods, and many others set out to recreate a place that was welcoming not only to players but to themselves. As I wrote in a previous post on Zork, these early games were crowdsourced before crowdsourcing was cool. Shareware was king and developer communities became a place to share code and experiment with existing works.

For Crowther, Adventure offered not only a return to Mammoth Cave but also a place to share with his daughters. A lot of us old school gamers now have families of our own and know how wonderful sharing these places can be! How many have eagerly presented an old console to their children anticipating the same excitement we felt at that age? Though my own children don’t yet share my fascination with classic computer games and interactive fictions, we all indulge in the occasional return to Black Mesa to play Half Life. 

What games provide you with that sense of place? Which games do you share with your children? Which did your parents share with you?

Speaking of special places, congratulations to the organizers of the Midwest Gaming Classic on landing the Wisconsin Center as a venue!

Taken from the Infocom text adventure A Mind Forever Voyaging, the command SUPERBRIEF displayed “the name of a place you have entered, even if you have never been there before.” It is also the title of Kristopher Purzycki’s weekly bit where he reflects upon the earliest PC games, their development, and their significance within the history of the medium.

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Photo by Marcin Wichary courtesy of cc 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

While students at MIT, Zork‘s authors set out to expand on Adventure, a shareware game (surely to be featured at a later date) which was bouncing around academic mainframes during the late 1970s. Named for the term used to describe uncompleted programs, Zork was later renamed Dungeon until TSR, publisher of Dungeons & Dragons, threatened to sue. Under its original title, Zork I was commercially released in 1980 to great success. Players were not only captivated by the expansive world, they also loved the sophisticated way the game used language. The sarcastic humor of the game (“It seems that the brick has other properties than weight, namely the ability to blow you to smithereens”) and the command structures that flowed much more like conventional English made for a fun and linguistically rich experience.

Box Art for Zork (Infocom, 1980)

For many of us, text adventures like Zork were among the first interactions with personal computers. The lack of graphics allowed players’ imaginations to conjure up landscapes in a resolution higher than anything a green phosphor monitor could render. What’s more, the strange jargon and logical structures of these games were doorways into exploring the catacombs of computer programming! It wasn’t long after my first experience in the Great Underground Empire that I set out to create my own realm. At the time, BASIC was the only language that I knew so I cobbled my own dungeon crawl from a series of IF-THEN-ELSE statements and variable inputs. That short game, something only its 10-year-old creator might have appreciated, never reached Zork‘s scale of course. The awe and wonder that it inspired, however, can still be felt every time I find myself standing in that open field looking again at that curiously boarded-up white house.

Taken from the Infocom text adventure A Mind Forever Voyaging, the command SUPERBRIEF displayed “the name of a place you have entered, even if you have never been there before.” It is also the title of Kristopher Purzycki’s weekly bit where he reflects upon the earliest PC games, their development, and their significance within the history of the medium.

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