Retroactive Fiction

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Galactic Hitchhiker (1980): inspo a-go-go
Apr 9, 2022 · original
TL/DR : Play Galactic Hitchhiker online Drawn by Twitter user @NoxHorror , the picture above has nothing to do with the subject of this blogpost Fit the First I’ve always said that if this blog had a slogan it would probably be something like “Retroactive Fiction: Very tentatively recommended.” So imagine my surprise when I read Jason Dyer’s blogpost about the 1980 text adventure game Galactic Hitchhiker : Jason played through the game and concluded that it was “far better than it ought to be” and that he would “ very tentatively recommend it” — whereupon I thought to myself, “Aha! This game and my blog were clearly meant for each other!” A. Knight’s tale Galactic Hitchhiker (GH), by A. Knight, is an early text adventure game — possibly the very first British text adventure game, in fact — and consequently it has a few quirks that set it apart from its later, more user-friendly successor
BeebScott: the Scott Adams interpreter nobody asked for
Feb 14, 2022 · original
TL/DR : See my Github repo . What is BeebScott? It’s an umbrella term for (1) an interpreter program that runs on the 8-bit BBC Micro computer and lets you play Scott Adams text adventure games on said Beeb; and (2) a Perl script that converts TRS-80 Scott Adams v8.x .DAT files (or ScottKit .sao files) for use with said interpreter (or “terp”). But when I use the word “BeebScott” I usually mean the terp specifically. Here’s a video, demoing the process of converting the Adventureland .DAT file for use with BeebScott: What the..? I know, right?! Why?! Why not? Seriously. Why? Largely because of Jason Compton’s game Ghost King : I was tickled by the idea of Scott Adams colliding with Shakespeare, and I thought it would be amusing to port the game to another retro platform — viz. the Beeb — but there was no way to do it. I couldn’t get my head round tautology’s existing toolchain , so that
IFComp 2020: Amazing Quest (Nick Montfort, C64 BASIC)
Oct 4, 2020 · original
I have no business writing about IFComp . A huge number of incredibly impressive games have been entered into the competition over the years, but I’ve only ever played a tiny fraction of them, so I just don’t feel qualified to expound on the subject, which is why I haven’t. Instead, I’ve stuck to my comfort zone, which is whittering on about the BBC Micro . But when I saw that one of the games in this year’s competition was written in BASIC for the C64 , I knew I had to give it a go. Yes or no? What I discovered was that Amazing Quest by Nick Montfort (author of the ingenious wordplay game Ad Verbum ) wasn’t really what I had hoped it would be. What I’d been hoping for was a full-blown text adventure game on a retro platform. But what I actually got was a short twelve-line program that generates random responses to user-input. That’s right: the input itself is completely irrelevant! The
Digging up Adventureland (Scott Adams, 1980)
Sep 13, 2020 · original
TL/DR : My BBC BASIC port of Scott Adams ’s classic TRS-80 text adventure game Adventureland, as published in SoftSide magazine in 1980, is now complete and available to download or to play in your web-browser: Play Adventureland Page 36, issue 22, SoftSide magazine, July 1980 Previously , I resurrected the original* version of Scott Adams’s second text adventure game, Pirate Adventure, and I ported it from TRS-80 BASIC to BBC BASIC — mostly for the heck of it but also because my port can be played in a web browser quite easily and the game is therefore more accessible now than it was before. So I thought I might as well go back to the game with which Adams’s career as a digital dungeonmaster began: the TRS-80 BASIC version of Adventureland . I assumed that because I’d already ported Pirate Adventure to the Beeb, porting Adventureland would be a walk in the park. Instead, I unexpectedly
Scott Adams’s type-in game Pirate Adventure (BYTE, 1980)
Aug 25, 2020 · original
Does anyone know of a working, playable version of Scott Adams’s text adventure game Pirate Adventure as published in the December 1980 issue of BYTE magazine? I couldn’t find one, which was a shame because I was trying to learn about Scott Adams’s adventure game interpreter and its associated database format, and I thought that going back to the source might be interesting. Page 192, BYTE magazine, December 1980 The BASIC program-listing in BYTE was intended to be manually typed into a TRS-80 computer, but I’m not very adept at wrangling TRS-80s, so I decided instead to convert the listing to BBC BASIC for the BBC Micro, which is very much in my wheelhouse. A quick look through the program suggested that the conversion would be straightforward: TRS-80 BASIC seemed, at a glance, very similar to its British cousin. I was nearly right. One significant difference between the two BASICs lies
LAND (1989) — a lost MUD recreated
Jun 26, 2020 · original
I’ll admit it: I don’t know very much about MUD s. (Nor am I familiar with the various spinoffs — the MUCKs, MOOs and MUSHes — that proliferated in the early days of the Net.) Many years ago, I would occasionally peek over the shoulder of someone who was engaged in playing one of those new-fangled online multiplayer games, only to shake my head in bewilderment at the strangeness of what was essentially a bunch of people who’d never met in real life, chattering away on the internet by laboriously typing and sending messages to each other in plain text. It seemed boring and weird and I was convinced it would never catch on. Today, of course, MUDs are practically ancient history, if you’re reckoning in tech years. They were the precursors to a multiplayer online gaming industry which is worth billions of dollars, but which has apparently left the world of pure text far behind. So, it’s quit
The Inform 7 website is [no longer] down
Jun 25, 2019 · original
For the last few days inform7.com has been unavailable. The site is the official host of the Inform 7 IDE. UPDATE : I’ve been informed that the outage is due to an unexpected error that affected the CMS for the Inform 7 website and that work is underway to try to bring the site back online as soon as possible. I tweeted Emily Short and the IFTF Foundation to ask if they knew about the outage, and I got these replies: Yes. Graham is working on it, but this involves building a replacement website, and it is not done yet. — Emily Short (@emshort) June 24, 2019 Yes, Graham is working on it. Thanks. — IF Technology Foundation (@IFTFoundation) June 24, 2019 I assume that the outage is due to Graham Nelson preparing the site for the upcoming changes to Inform that he announced at the recent NarraScope conference, but as far as I’m aware there hasn’t been any official warning about the outage, n
One Room (1983) — the first one-room game?
Aug 10, 2018 · original
One Room is a text adventure game written by Jorge Mir for the TRS-80 Color Computer. It was published as a program-listing in the first Rainbow Book of Adventures in 1983. One Room is set in a single room (duh), in which the player-character is trapped. The object of the game is to escape from the room. One Room is therefore a contender for the title of First Ever Room-Escape Game . (Or maybe not .) It might even be the first text adventure game to be set in a single room. (But possibly not .)* Although the published program-listing contains several bugs — which are documented at the Gaming After 40 blog (for which I’m extremely thankful) — the game is nevertheless intriguing and full of quirky ideas. It’s constructed around an innovative plot device. It comes with a built-in HELP system. It includes a surprising miscellany of objects that you can manipulate. And it’s of historical inte
Maze of Madness (2018) — a torment
Apr 24, 2018 · original
Maze of Madness is a modern game for an ancient computer (namely the 8-bit BBC Micro , which this blog seems to endlessly bang on about). Well, I say “game”, but it’s more of a demo – a demo of a rather cruel puzzle. But it is actually solvable, if you spot the trick. Mathbrush , the Official Unofficial Historian of IF , said that he’d never come across any other game that uses the gimmick that’s used in MoM . Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing is not for me to say. Because unfortunately I’m the author. You can play the game online . More details about the game can be found at Stardot , at CASA , and at IFDB .
Xanadu Adventure (1982) — shop till you drop
Apr 17, 2018 · original
Xanadu Adventure is a text adventure game that was written for the BBC Micro by Paul Shave in 1982. Typically for the time, Shave was strongly influenced by Crowther and Woods’s Colossal Cave , and Xanadu therefore featured the requisite stream, grating, and forest-maze… But there was little chance that any jaded adventurers would be bored by these all-too-familiar surroundings because before they could start exploring the game they were forced to go shopping. The game opens with a list of miscellaneous items including weapons, torches, food, and, um, postcards. And each item is given a price. You’re then told that you have “125 shillings to spend”, and it’s up to you to decide exactly how to spend it — although initially you have no idea which of the items are going to be of any use. The adventure shop and the player’s limited spending power were just a couple of ways in which Xanadu Ad
Escape From Solaris (1984) by Graham Nelson
Apr 12, 2018 · original
Previously I wrote about The Discovery , which is the first of two works of interactive fiction (known together as Galaxy’s Edge ) that were written for the 8-bit BBC Micro in 1984 by Graham Nelson . The Discovery is, more or less, a conventional single-player text adventure game. But the second game, Escape From Solaris , is for two players. It can be played either in split-screen mode on a single BBC Micro, with players taking alternate turns at the keyboard, or, unusually, on two BBC Micros connected together with a serial communications cable ( RS-423 ). This early form of “networked gaming” was an innovation. In fact, Escape From Solaris is the only Beeb game I know of that works in quite this way. (I did manage to find a BBC Micro version of Battleships that also used RS-423 comms between two Beebs, but Solaris is probably the only text adventure to do so.) I’d been wanting to try
Skill, Stamina and Luck
Jun 26, 2016 · original
In February 2016, the BBC broadcast a radio documentary about interactive fiction called Skill, Stamina and Luck . It focused largely on gamebooks like Fighting Fantasy , Choose Your Own Adventure , and some interesting historical examples — but it also took in parser fiction (text adventure games) and Twine . To accompany the programme, the BBC created an interesting “ interactive audio history of interactive fiction ” in the form of a Twine web app, which included a simulation of a play-by-telephone adaptation of a Fighting Fantasy book and many audio clips of interviews, some new and some from the archive, with people like Steve Jackson , Ian Livingstone , Andrea Phillips and Emily Short . (The Twine also included the audio from this episode of Micro Live , in which the BBC visited the offices of Infocom .) The Twine app had been taken down from the BBC website, but it’s now been made
Galaxy’s Edge (1984) by Graham Nelson
Sep 3, 2015 · original
[UPDATE: You can now play Galaxy’s Edge online .] Galaxy’s Edge is a two-part text adventure game created in 1984 for the 8-bit BBC Micro computer by Graham Nelson. I believe it was this Graham Nelson , the creator of the interactive-fiction programming language Inform – at least, people seem to think it was him. [UPDATE: It definitely was .] Loading screen for Galaxy’s Edge, part 1 Part 1 of Galaxy’s Edge is a conventional but well constructed adventure in which you roam the stars in the Scout Ship Orion and unravel an intergalactic mystery. Screenshot of the beginning of The Discovery, the first part of Galaxy’s Edge The second part, Escape From Solaris , is an ingenious two-player game which was designed to be run either on a single machine, in split-screen mode, or on two separate BBC Micros connected together by a special cable (the wiring diagram for which now seems to be lost, tog
The Secret of Arendarvon Castle (1985) — bytecode avant la lettre
May 30, 2015 · original
[ Play Arendarvon Castle online ] [ backup ] In previous posts , I wrote about Wander (1974), the interactive fiction creation tool for mainframe Unix systems. But my speciality (I use the word laughably) is text adventure games for the BBC Micro , the legendary 8-bit microcomputer that helped kickstart the 1980s home-computing revolution in the UK. (The story of its creation has been immortalised on film .) The Secret of Arendarvon Castle by Arend Rensink is a text adventure game that was written not just for the BBC Micro but also for the Sinclair Spectrum, the Apple II, the Commodore 64, and the IBM PC. The game was notable for several reasons. Bytecode Firstly, the fact that there were versions for so many different systems can be explained in part by the way that the game was implemented — as a sort of bytecode . The bytecode ran on a small virtual machine, and there was a different
Wander follow-up
May 20, 2015 · original
Previously I wrote about Wander , the 1974 mainframe text adventure game-creation system by Peter Langston , which was recently rediscovered. You can now play Wander online . This em-dosbox repackaging of a DOS port of Wander was created by me, using blunt instruments. (I broke the SAVE and RESTORE commands, for example.) Please contact me if you know how to improve my rather crude hack. Which came first? Wander or ADVENT? Some of the Wander “worlds” that were recently recovered are 1980s versions, and include features that were added in response to ADVENT . (Peter Langston was apparently a member of the “ UNIX Adventure Tastefulness Committee ”, which was convened to sort out “Various design questions” surrounding the conversion of ADVENT to UNIX.) But the very first versions of Wander – which are still lost – date from 1974 or earlier, so you can’t help asking yourself (or at least I c
Wander (1974) — a lost mainframe game is found!
Apr 22, 2015 · original
I really have no right to take credit for this, because although I must have read about Wander in the Inform Designer’s Manual some years ago, it only really registered with me after I saw a list of lost mainframe games in Jason Dyer’s recent blogpost . Wander was probably the first computer game that is recognisable as what came to be known as a “text adventure” (or “ interactive fiction ”) – pre-dating even ADVENT (a.k.a. Colossal Cave ) by Crowther and Woods! But Wander was more than that because it seems to have been designed to be a tool to allow users to create “non-deterministic fantasy stories” [1] of their own. So perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Wander was in fact the earliest known precursor to modern interactive-fiction development-systems like Inform 7 ! Wander was thought to be lost, presumably languishing on one or more of the slowly decaying tape-reels of mai
L — A Mathemagical Adventure (1984)
Jan 21, 2015 · original
A video playthrough of the classic 1980s educational mathematics game L — A Mathemagical Adventure by the UK Association of Teachers of Mathematics, for the 8-bit BBC Micro computer : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKMeuxsvk3k&list=PLy5HwFxc67UFERGEqbKU-Ky74QwEtuLsm Loading screen of the game “L — A Mathemagical Adventure” for the 8-bit BBC Micro computer

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