Halo 3 is for sissies!
It all started with The Colossal Cave Adventure (or just Adventure) written in Fortran in 1976. Next came Dungeon the following year, but everyone called it Zork. And computer games were never the same afterwards.
69105 forever!
For Kindle and with free ePub version. Only $9.49 Great reading.
Here is what Gary Shapiro CEO of the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) said: Dvorak's writing sings with insight and clarity. Whether or not you agree with John's views, he will get you thinking and is never boring. These essays are worth the read!
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That is pretty darn cool. Zork is a bit before my time. I never really got a chance to play the old text games.
Heres your chance. I was in the same boat and discovered this game is hard! =)
http://thcnet.net/zork/index.php
pflugh!
it is pitch black…you are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Nice seeing you at Gnomedex, John.
Spent way too many hours on Zork. Wow, I feel old now.
You are in a dark room, there is an doorway to the South and a rug on the floor……..
Cool Glad to see the original copy in color.
I have a photocopy of this same map that was printed in a DEC systems journal. As I recall though, Zork I for the Apple ][ differed a bit from this map when I tried to use this to cheat my way through the dungeon.
Ah, that takes me back – Colossal Cave on my uncle’s old Heathkit.
Yeah, Halo and WoW are for the imagination-impaired!
The sad thing is we still have a DEC system at work for medical records 🙁 I wonder if we can get a game going there 😉
i just remember that in the Apple II version, you needed to close your eyes and you became invisible to some of the monsters
CAN I POINT OUT….
That this was NOT a graphical adventure…Make that known…
This was a text adventure. Only words were shown.
Thanks for the story John… Susan and I played this for hours on our Apple II plus, over the Compuserve network. If I remember right we had 64kb of memory and we souped it up with a 1200 baud modem.
Good Times!
PLUGH
What’s interesting in a long term view is that Will Crowther’s ex-wife, Patricia, is more famous than he is in caving circles. Pat was one of the group of cavers that connected the Flint Ridge cave system with Mammoth Cave in central Kentucky, back in the early 1970s. Will was supposed to be on the connection trip, but couldn’t make it for some reason.
This is great! I forgot all about this game, I have it for the Atari 800 (which I still have and it still works). Here is a link to download the series:
http://www.infocom-if.org/downloads/downloads.html
Now back to the salt mines!
Ok – Zork is cool and all (nice map btw), and I did at one point in the past feel the addicting pull of text based games… but the whole “Halo 3 is for sissies!” comment is really weak sauce batman – it doesnt take all the much skill to play zork – the same cannot be said for Halo – a level of skill is required if you dont want to get pwned by some 9 yr old kid…
Darn, Uncle Dave — I’m in trapped in a twisty maze of passages that all look alike!
I ported the original source for Adventure to the PDP-11 in 1978. Even got a nice comment from Crowther. [I’m not old just because I’ve an Alpha Micro that can still play it.]
Some nostalgia is good. I played both adventure and Zork on an Osborne 1 suitcase sized portable computer. Drew my own map but not as nice as the one shown above. I remember a clue that helped me solve the final puzzle was “I usually get thirsty after eating hot peppers.”
I’ve tried Halo and WOW and they just don’t keep me interested. Maybe it was the newness of the technology that also kept us up at night writing our own progarams, which I don’t do anymore either.
“Colossal Cave Adventure”? Was that anything like what I remember called “Wumpus”? There were maze adventures running on the old R.S. TRS-80 “computer”. I edited a few for it, and later for my Apple II. I got Leo Laporte and Patrick Norton to autograph my copy of “More Basic Computer Games” which I believe has the Wumpus game in it.
I remember playing Colossal Cave while I was a student at Utah State in 1981. It was one of the programs we were required to use the first week of Computer Programming classes, but was banned for the rest of the quarter since most students would log onto the game and not let anyone get their homework done.
I still have my purple-glowing wishbringer stone. I think this is about the time infocom hit its stride, sorcerer/enchater/spellbreaker and wishbringer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunt_the_Wumpus
Infocom games were the first that truly enthralled me and my friends for hours; but Wizardy was that first game that would bring eight or more of us to the computer all at once.
I played Zork with my husband-then-boyfriend in law school on my Kaypro. We crafted a similar map, several taped-together pieces of graph paper. Yup — feeling old and creaky — but proud!
OK,
Who remembers MORIA??
And the Rabid vampire bunnies??
21,
Have you picked up Wizardry 8??
I did..
I still haven’t finished it. I’ll give it another shot now
Hey what?
I did some drawing when i was at grade school, similar like that too!
Adventure was also available in 1977-78 on the first Data General Eclipse mini computers that ran their multiuser-multitasking AOS operating system. We finally had to delete the game because the programmers were spending so much time, effort and CPU playing it. What a game!
about time we had a real post here….
there were 12 rels in the adventure series
pirates isle 1 and 2
mission impossible…
the rest i didn’t solve
i moved on to hack after that..
fucking cockatrice!
as soon as this bbs adds doors i’ll donate
Imagine if someone had taken this chart more than seriously
They and not bill gates would be the millionaire and billionaire
wow, talk about memories! I got so stuck in adventure and Zork, i would beg friends for help! we would all trade our tips and tricks around.
xyzzy!