Sensitivity to Initial Conditions
"You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here."
So begins Zork I, the first piece of successful 'interactive fiction' - the text adventure game. The earliest examples - going to back to the ultimate ancestor, Colossal Cave - were mostly just treasure hunts, exploring caverns and dungeons and solving sometimes obtuse puzzles that were riddled with inside jokes. It's not a coincidence that they developed in parallel with Dungeons & Dragons, although they tended to be a hybrid of fantasy adventure meeting modern tech - the nameless adventurer of Zork is usually depicted with a magic sword in one hand and a battery-powered brass lantern in another. In later years, the games started to live up to the name, branching into sci-fi, detective stories, spy tales, and so on. In fact, when the commercial period of the field ended in the early 90s, it truly began embracing all types of fiction.
Not that I was aware of my first brush with Zork when I encountered it on the visit to the science center mentioned in the first post. No, that came years later; a trip to visit a friend of my parents, where they had a copy installed on their computer. The friend that traveled with me (whose name I've sadly forgotten) took turns playing it on their computer. Really, that's the only part of the trip that I remember after all this time.
In the meantime, I became more familiar with the works of Scott Adams (no relation to the Dilbert creator), who I didn't find out until a few years ago had actually been based a few miles from my own house here in Florida. Unlike Zork, his games tended to be extremely simplistic in execution; a clumsy VERB NOUN interface that was a consequence of the extremely limited space of some of the early computers (my first computer - the Texas Instruments 99-4/A - had only 48K, no hard drive, and used a cassette tape player to save and load programs). It wasn't until I had an Apple IIc that I was able to not only play Zork and the other related games (with the awesome power of 128K of memory and 5 1/4" floppy disks), but program some of my own. Sadly, these examples are lost in time, although I'm guessing that much like stories you write at that age it's probably for the best they never see daylight.
Fast forwarding to the future, the hobbyist period of interactive fiction exploded into a ongoing community which I stumbled across, along with a tool to create these games called Inform 7. So I began working on my own creation - "Sensitivity to Initial Conditions".
Fun name, right? Well, actually, it's a nostalgic throwback to the early days I alluded to at the start - a treasure hunt, starting outside the white house (not really - it's more like 'a' white house). It is in many ways the fulfillment of something that I've always wanted to do since I was young, playing these games; but restricted by a lack of memory, or a decent programming platform. I compensated by making endless games that consisted of maps and puzzles that were never going to actually be programmed. But now, I can do just that; so this is very much a labor of love. I hope to have a working beta soon for this, but not just yet. But I certainly recommend giving the original Zork a whirl.
Not that I was aware of my first brush with Zork when I encountered it on the visit to the science center mentioned in the first post. No, that came years later; a trip to visit a friend of my parents, where they had a copy installed on their computer. The friend that traveled with me (whose name I've sadly forgotten) took turns playing it on their computer. Really, that's the only part of the trip that I remember after all this time.
In the meantime, I became more familiar with the works of Scott Adams (no relation to the Dilbert creator), who I didn't find out until a few years ago had actually been based a few miles from my own house here in Florida. Unlike Zork, his games tended to be extremely simplistic in execution; a clumsy VERB NOUN interface that was a consequence of the extremely limited space of some of the early computers (my first computer - the Texas Instruments 99-4/A - had only 48K, no hard drive, and used a cassette tape player to save and load programs). It wasn't until I had an Apple IIc that I was able to not only play Zork and the other related games (with the awesome power of 128K of memory and 5 1/4" floppy disks), but program some of my own. Sadly, these examples are lost in time, although I'm guessing that much like stories you write at that age it's probably for the best they never see daylight.
Fast forwarding to the future, the hobbyist period of interactive fiction exploded into a ongoing community which I stumbled across, along with a tool to create these games called Inform 7. So I began working on my own creation - "Sensitivity to Initial Conditions".
Fun name, right? Well, actually, it's a nostalgic throwback to the early days I alluded to at the start - a treasure hunt, starting outside the white house (not really - it's more like 'a' white house). It is in many ways the fulfillment of something that I've always wanted to do since I was young, playing these games; but restricted by a lack of memory, or a decent programming platform. I compensated by making endless games that consisted of maps and puzzles that were never going to actually be programmed. But now, I can do just that; so this is very much a labor of love. I hope to have a working beta soon for this, but not just yet. But I certainly recommend giving the original Zork a whirl.
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