Gosh I played this so much as a kid. Got pretty far all on my own.
Somehow I'm dumber as an adult. :D
Classic 1984 video game Robot Odyssey available online
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Re: Classic 1984 video game Robot Odyssey available online
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
After posting that, I ran into this, which I feel obligated to post: the most recent comment on the article, apparently from Alan Kay, 6/16/2017 (the article was published 01/2014). "A few corrections. (I was Chief Scientist of Atari at the time.) I told the TLC people that this was the greatest game concept that I'd ever seen (and still think so). I had loved Rocky's Boots and was really excited when Ann showed me t…
We were discussing Robot Odyssey and SimCity a while back: ---- http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/139 Discussion with Alan Kay about Robot Odyssey One of Alan Kay's favorite games is Robot Odyssey! I wrote to him: From: Don Hopkins Subject: Robot Odyssey One thing I've always wanted to do is a re-make of Robot Odyssey, with the full power of a real programming language underneath it, and lots of cool toys for the…
Thank you for sharing all these emails!
For anyone else, Alan Kay is one of the most creative and interesting of the early computer pioneers. He was a major figure at Xerox PARC, and if you want to read more, a lot of that story is covered in Dealers of Lightning by Michael Hiltzik.
Re: Classic 1984 video game Robot Odyssey available online
#23I cannot recommend this enough. I loved playing this with my dad when I was a kid.
Re: Classic 1984 video game Robot Odyssey available online
#24oh my goooosh this is amazing. See: https://blog.codinghorror.com/heres-the-programming-game-you... and specifically http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2014/01/rob...
From the Slate article: "When Teri Perl described the project to legendary computer scientist Alan Kay, he said, “You’re wasting your time. It can’t be done.” That is, the basic idea was simply too complex to run on an Apple home computer. When Robot Odyssey shipped, the company gave Wallace a plaque that said, “It can’t be done. —Alan Kay.”" That's an awesome story.
An "awesome story" that isn't the way it happened (as with too many "awesome stories"). See the comment I made (posted below by niawalker). To summarize here, I said I love "Rocky's Boots", and I love the basic idea of "Robot Odyssey", but for end-users, using simple logic gates to program multiple robots in a cooperative strategy game blows up too much complexity for very little utility. A much better way to do this would be to make a "next Logo" that would allow game players to make the AI brains needed by the robots.
So what I actually said, is that doing it the way you are doing it will wind up with a game that is not successful or very playable.
Just why they misunderstood what I said is a bit of a mystery, because I spelled out what could be really good for the game (and way ahead of what other games were doing). And of course it would work on an Apple II and other 8 bit micros (Logo ran nicely on them, etc.)
Re: Classic 1984 video game Robot Odyssey available online
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
From: Alan Kay Date: Mon, 12 Nov 2007 13:55:27 -0800 (PST) Subject: Re: Just curious ... To: Samuel Klein, Don Hopkins, Chris Trottier, John Gilmore Hi SJ -- Robot Odyssey is another game that would benefit from having a clean separation between the graphical/physical modeling simulation and the behavioral parts (both the games levels and the robot programming could be independently separated out) -- this would make…
Does anyone here remember ZZT? I loved building puzzles in that game with the scripting language. You didn't program to play, but you could make your own games and program the behavior of special objects. It's the closest realized example I can think of to what Alan described here.
I remember ZZT -- and the excitement when I found an archive of alternate worlds I could download from a BBS. Learning to program ZZT worlds was one of the first steps I took to programming.