About this blog and text adventures

The first text adventures I heard about were by Scott Adams. Not the creator of Dilbert, but some super text guru who had a knack for making text adventure games with a two-word parser (MOP WATER, EAT PIE, COMMUNICATE AMBIGUITY). I did a little digging through some 1980s computer magazines (which was the thing to do considering it was the 1980s), and I found a stunning hodgepodge of labyrinths and houses and industrial structures with alluring names and descriptions. It was an article about Zork, a commercial groundbreaker for the text adventure industry.

And I daydreamed about playing the games for the next two years.

South Berwick wasn't and isn't a poor town by any stretch, but the computer revolution was just beginning. Our computer room had just one computer, an Apple IIc, and then a IIe. Everyone had to sign up for a pass for a half hour time slot, even the teachers.

But the games that were on there were far from text adventures. There was President Elect, a game where you chose from dozens of 1980s political candidates, engaged in debates and clashed along the campaign trail. My most amusing memory was learning that I could win with President Reagan by making a valid point 20% of the time and bullshitting the other 80. Though the game taught me a lot about the political machine, it boiled down to picking an equation with a famous name on it and seeing what stuck.

There was a Star Trek game where I had to lope from quadrant to quadrant firing phasers and photon torpedoes. But it was written in Basic, so I was able to hack all the damage levels of my weapons, get infinite shields (well, ok, have an energy level in the billions), and so on. So, a little fun in how I could break it.

But text adventures...

The closest I came for a long time was Tunnels of Doom, a quasi-3D hack-and-slash that had barebones narration with intriguing monsters and special abilities. My brother hoaxed me about a cyclops he claimed he saw on Level 10, and trying to find that son of a bitch helped many a summer afternoon go by. But eventually it, too, was mastered, and when the cassette drive got fuzzy I couldn't load the game I'd saved on tape.


The TI-99/4A was dying in popularity, and cheap games were the rage in my room. I finally scored Pyramid of Doom and a game where I was in a nuclear reactor and had to save the world with a mop bucket full of heavy water.

It was a start. Having to sum up my thoughts in two words was a big challenge at first, but I got used to "climb ladder", "press button", and so on, with the occasional who-knew mind-bender. "Alleviate serpent"? "Wrangle hypotenuse"? Maybe not exactly, but damned close.

If you're Googling yourself right now, Original Scott Adams, and stumbling onto this post, I have to ask you: what the hell was up with the snake at the portal in Pyramid of Doom? Six times out of ten it would kill me the second I opened the portal, but some sort of bug (or your own programming caprice) would give me one turn to face my doom. Couldn't shoot it, charm it, beat it, eat it, poison it, anything. But it would ignore all my commands and then fall on my head like the angel of death the next command I typed.

But my first dalliance with a sentence-analyzing parser came from Zork. Dan Blakeslee, you have my eternal apologies for repeatedly coming to your house and asking to play. But there was nothing better going on in South Berwick in that post-70s time than to plug into some wild ideas from another barrel full of slightly older, on-top-of-the-world geeks. It was the first immersive virtual reality I'd experienced.

Over the years I've taken the easy way out with wordy video games -- RPGs and Silent Hill -- and scratched the surface of World of Warcraft. But with a friend's gift of an iPod and one app out of dozens -- Frotz -- things have come full circle. I've found a lot of games I missed in the 1990s, and resources that will let us all play together and discuss the games.

I will be adding more to this blog, especially as it's just about an hour old, and who knows... maybe running Textadventuretron can become an adventure in itself.

Lionel Houde

P.S. If you have your own resources you want to suggest or share, by all means please mention them.