First and Only Time

I've written a lot of amateurish stories - in both the sense of not looking to publish and in the level of aptitude - and I've designed a lot of interactive fiction games.  That is to say in the later case that I've drawn the traditional 'adventure game' map of boxes and lines, annotated with the locations of items and a 'solution' for a game that only existed hypothetically.  But there was one game I actually completed.

(I'm being a little unfair to myself.  I did follow through in a number of computer games, including a 2D helicopter game that used ASCII graphics that I wrote on a trip out west; by a minor coincidence, when I got to visit the Trinity Site, or at least the sign outside the site where the first atomic bomb was detonated, and today is the anniversary of the test.  But I digress - I also adapted a 'choose your own adventure' story that a friend wrote and threw in mini-games that I was rather proud of, even saving high scores to another disk.   That wasn't strictly an 'interactive fiction' game nor did I write the bulk of the text, so...)

I may have first played Zork, but the Scott Adams adventure games were where I cut my teeth, because my first computer (a Texas Instruments 99-4/A) had only 48K and could never handle any of the more sophisticated games like Zork.  The format was absurdly simple; you typed "VERB NOUN" and got a response.  It occasionally could do more with a cheat, such as if you typed "INSERT CARD" the response might be "Into what?" and then you could type "INTO SLOT".  However, the trick was that the game treated "INTO" as a verb and you could, in fact, type "INTO SLOT" without typing "INSERT CARD" first.   With limited memory, you took what shortcuts you could.

It also made it easy for a BASIC programmer like myself recreate the game engine without ever seeing the source code.  By that time I had graduated to the Apple IIc with 128K of RAM, and had more room to maneuver.  Now most of the imitators would simply go the usual route of a 'treasure hunt', and I felt I had to go beyond that (note: the game I'm working on now is, on the surface, primarily a treasure hunt - take that, past self?) and steal from another Scott Adams game, called "Voodoo Castle", where you have to rescue a "Count Christo" from a voodoo curse.  I also split the game into two parts just in case I hit the memory wall.

The code - and the title - are sadly lost to history.  My recollection of the game itself was mostly 'meh' with a few gems.  I violated a tenet of game design by having a puzzle that could be solved by dying - a room where a crossbow bolt killed you upon entering, unless you have a Shield.  The first part ended in a clever little bit where you had to burn away a wooden room using gasoline and a string, although I can't for the life of me think of a justification why or how the villain created a wooden room inside a stone room.

The second part had a repeat of the Shield puzzle (this time falling stalactites) but it did have one design I was proud of - you had to take a photo and develop the film, and you did so by using a timer in a film lab room to temporarily turn down the lights.  Later on, you had to dispose of a bomb but delay the explosion; there were screw holes on the bomb, and if you examined the timer you could see it was screwed into the wall.  You had to unscrew the timer and attach it to the bomb and then turn the timer; it could then be disposed.

It's odd to note that I wrote that game about 30 years ago this year, and here I am back again working on something like it.  Nothing like going back to the beginning again.