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Hi! Yes I did! It was one of 3 in the greater orlando area. AI Computer Center. I have since heard from other new friends that were also kids back then dumpster diving at the store. Apparently a lof treasures found new homes in the local area. Very neat! Did you know a Brian, Jonathan, Rob or Kevin perhaps?
One of my partners in crime was named John Taylor.
Cool!
Thanks for sharing your story Scott. Back when you wrote your early games, what were your toolchain and development process?
Really good question! I was working on a TRS-80 Level II machine (this was a model 1 before there wer models). It was my first home appliance computer, before that I had homebrews. It came with Microsoft Basic. I had only used tiny basic up until then and wanted to play with strings. It sounded neat to be able to manipulate language with them. I wrote a game language, a compiler for the language, and an interpreter f…
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Which is a good point. Back when the internet was starting to bloom I got a nice email from Scott Adams of Dilbert. Seems he had gotten a number of fan mails meant for me and was trying to find who to send it to. I also had a number of fan mails meant for him! We exchanged the mails and had a nice chat about it!
In the completely random department, your picture was (I think) on the cover of some Apple magazine back in the 80s (maybe SoftTalk?) and my geometry class got a great deal of enjoyment out of the fact that you and our geometry teacher could have been twins.
Stupid question, how do I play these games? They sound great.
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Why did you cause me to have childhood nightmares about chiggers? I didn't even know what they were, growing up in New England, but they scared the heck out of me at six years old. Thanks for that! Actually, honestly, thanks for sparking my imagination enough to want to code my own text adventures, which began my life long love of programming.
I am so very sorry about the chiggers. I grew up with them in Florida and they were not a fun experience for me either. I am though delighted to hear that my classic games were helpful in you understanding your own gifts! I appreciate you sharing that with me!
Hi Scott! Do you have any thoughts on how hard it is to come up with original adventure game puzzles and what your process is here? When I was looking at this once, I noticed there's a lot of puzzles that are shared between recent adventure games that you can find in older adventure games too e.g. screwdriver + screws, rusty door + oil, distract an NPC so you can steal something. Instead of this being from lack of or…
Check out All Things Devour and Vicious Cycles, both have time travel mechanics.
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Pirate Adventure was the first game I had on my Atari 800. I really loved it. I still remember coming across the terms "pieces of eight" and "flotsam and jetsam" and having to ask my mom what they meant. I seem to recall it was my first encounter with the the word "flat" meaning apartment. My vocabulary was thus improved by your work. Thanks!
Yes those were all terms I used in my game! I loved reading and had a good vocubulary that I liked to use when it seemed appropriate :) I am happy you have such good memories of my classic games! Have you tried any of my new ones?
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Not only was it a tangent, the analogy is as precise as one could get: the two topics are connected only at a single point (the coincidence of the name) and have literally nothing else to do with each other. Edit: you've unfortunately been posting a lot of unsubstantive comments lately. Would you please stop doing that? It's not what this site is for.
You're deceiving yourself if you don't think the other Scott Adams has ever generated an eyerolling controversy better off left avoided. Moreso if you think that interpretation isn't possible from the headline and might mislead some. I'm not sure what to think since I'm fairly certain you're intelligent and have a good memory, but I'm also supposed to assume good faith. Per my comments, I honestly don't know what you…
You can't go by upvotes alone - fluff and indignation routinely get lots of upvotes. This is a weakness of the upvoting system (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...). A countervailing system is needed, and at HN that system is the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) plus moderation. So I'm afraid you're stuck with our judgment about what's substantive, if you want to keep commenting here.
That doesn't mean it's arbitrary, though. We have to stay within the bounds of what the community supports, or else we'd provoke a huge backlash and chaos on the site. Since there isn't a huge backlash and chaos on the site, moderation practice is within the bounds of what the community supports.
I'm certainly not intending to insult you and don't mean to insinuate anything; I'm just trying to point out where your comments have been breaking the site guidelines and conventions of the site, the same way I would with anyone. For better or worse, that's my job.
Hi Scott! Do you have any thoughts on how hard it is to come up with original adventure game puzzles and what your process is here? When I was looking at this once, I noticed there's a lot of puzzles that are shared between recent adventure games that you can find in older adventure games too e.g. screwdriver + screws, rusty door + oil, distract an NPC so you can steal something. Instead of this being from lack of or…
Most of IF games have puzzless very different from the ones from the graphical adventures as the text medium can set really complex interactions. Check out All Things Devour and Vicious Cycles, both have time travel mechanics.
I used to think this but do you think most text adventures wouldn't work as graphical adventures? Most text adventure puzzles I see are "USE X ON Y" (or the verb required is obvious), nothing complex, the same as graphical adventures. I think All Things Devours would work, except it might have to be turn based.
> Check out All Things Devour and Vicious Cycles, both have time travel mechanics.
Are there good examples without time travel, magic, cartoon logic, sci-fi etc.? My theory is something like this has to be introduced because there just aren't enough interesting "USE X ON Y" style puzzles that haven't been seen before or are too silly/obscure e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_hair_mustache_puzzle.