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My 1981 adventure game is now a multimedia extravaganza

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Re: My 1981 adventure game is now a multimedia extravaganza

#11

Post by OhMeadhbh »

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.

Re: My 1981 adventure game is now a multimedia extravaganza

#13

Post by dekhn »

wrongcards wrote: post #10
technothrasher wrote: post #2

"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 d…

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 was…

There wasn't the internet, but there was a book. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Adventure_Games

After a number of very frustrating experiences I ended up buying this. For example, in the Sierra Online game "Dark Crystal", i was absolutely stuck in one spot (ruining my enjoyment of the full game) where I needed to "LISTEN BROOK".

There was another game, (Mad Venture), where I needed to read the book so I could do "THROW DOLL".

Re: My 1981 adventure game is now a multimedia extravaganza

#14

Post by dekhn »

agiacalone wrote: post #5
technothrasher wrote: post #2

"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 d…

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 g…

One of the highlights of my youth was attending Apple convention in boston in the 1980s and meeting Lord British (Richard Garriot). He saw that I liked the game and asked me to stand in the kiosk and teach people how to play it.

Re: My 1981 adventure game is now a multimedia extravaganza

#16

Post by dsiegel2275 »

OhMeadhbh wrote: post #8
dsiegel2275 wrote: post #3

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 m…

Ack! There's a timer! I have to think fast!

Besides the setting of the sewers, the timer is really the ONLY aspect of the original game that I remember!

Re: My 1981 adventure game is now a multimedia extravaganza

#19

Post by mrandish »

wrongcards wrote: post #10
technothrasher wrote: post #2

"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 d…

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 was…

> the first graphical RPG I ever played, Dungeons of Daggorath

In case you didn't know Dungeons of Daggorath (1982) for the Radio Shack Color Computer featured significantly in the best-selling sci-fi book "Ready Player One" (although it was not an element in movie). https://readyplayerone.fandom.com/wiki/Dungeons_of_Daggorath

I got my Color Computer in 1982 and banged my head on Daggorath for many hours. Randomly reading Ready Player One in 2012 was surreal. There were so many impossibly obscure references to esoteric 80s computer and arcade trivia that was personally very significant to me - but to almost no one else - it felt like I was being punked by someone that knew me. And the more I read, the more bizarre coincidences kept piling up - from Daggorath on the Coco to knowing how to beat a Joust arcade cabinet with the arcane pterodactyl bug which was only present in Red/Yellow Joust cabinets. The Coco was obscure, maybe 1/100th as popular as the Commodores and Ataris, and Daggorath wasn't even close to a top selling game on it.

In the early 80s, every time I'd go to an arcade I was always on the lookout for a red/yellow Joust so I could drop a high score. I also read Rainbow Magazine every month and even flew across the country to attend the first RainbowFest in Chicago. Good times, indeed.

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