Tuesday, June 6, 2017

A maze of twisty passages, all alike

The very first computer game I ever played (in the 1970s, on line printer terminals) was Adventure, or ADVENT as it was called.  It is legendary in computer circles.

Surprisingly, ADVENT was never open sourced.  Until now, and Open Adventure.  If you pride yourself on your long-time nerd cred, then go and get you some of that.


3 comments:

Ed Skinner said...

My memory is rusty but I *think* Adventure predates the concept of open source; it has been available in that form since very early days.

The original Fortran version was distributed in alt.sources in netnews. I compiled and ran that version in the early 1970s. The game was then saved by making a copy of the machine language and data variables binary execution image. Players would start the game with the compiled version but when they did a "save", it made a local copy including the content of their variables at that time. If you died, your local copy was erased and you had to start over.

Solving the game could be done by playing from scratch each time. But it was far more efficient to play up to some "safe" point, do a "save" and then make a second copy of that saved version. If you then were killed by the little nasty dwarf, you would re-copy the spirited-away copy back as you local copy and re-incarnate yourself at the "safe" point.

As I recall, I had as many as a dozen "safe" copies at various points of apparent progress when I finally found the trick to garnering the final point in the original 350 point game.

(I still have my paper and pencil map!)

LindaG said...

That reminds me a lot of ZORK, which was the first computer game I ever tried to play. I was not, and still am not, anywhere near a nerd or geek.

drjim said...

You're standing in front of a mailbox......