Adventure Games

3rd April 2001

My first programming love was adventure games, and they're maybe still the area that excites me the most. For anyone who doesn't know what I mean by the term ``adventure games'', I'm talking about text-only problem-solving games, where you move a charcter through an imaginary world with commands like GO NORTH, GET KEY and UNLOCK DOOR.

I cut my teeth on the primitive but atmospheric Scott Adams games running on a TRS-80; much later I got to play excruciatingly slow Commodore 64 implementations of the classic Infocom games including the legendary Zork trilogy. (If you don't remember this far back, Commodore's absurdly large 1541-series 5¹/₄-inch floppy drive was connected to the computer by a serial lead - yes, really - which didn't help the performance.)

Entranced by the original Scott Adams Adventureland (``You're in a forest. You can also see: trees''), I wanted to write my own adventures from the moment I knew the fundamentals of BASIC programming. In the quarter-century since that fatal first encounter, I've written part or all of twenty-five adventure games.

This area of my web site is dedicated to those games. Yes, this is an insanely egotistical, navel-gazing exercise, and no, I don't imagine it will be interesting to many people apart from me. That said, I'm sure there are other people who, like me, enjoy wallowing in the nostalgia of 1980s ``classic gaming''.

Here's what I've got, sort of in chronological order:

a list of all my adventure games, in chronological order, with descriptions and historical notes.
My first commercial game, Magic Mirror, including a hacked copy, maps, solutions, etc.
My second commercial game, Nosferatu, including a hacked copy, a link to the emulator you need to play it, maps, solutions and trivia.
Stuff about my most successful commercial game, The Causes of Chaos.
An endearingly naive article that I wrote in 1987 about how to write adventure games in BASIC. Ah, the simplicity of it all.
A source-code distribution for the horribly ugly and incomplete prototype adventure which was my first serious attempt to use a language other than BASIC.
Stuff about MUNDI, my first true multi-user game, which may have been the first ever to run over the internet; including the source code (which I'm sort of embarrassed about, but there you go.)
Herring, the game I've been working on for the last decade, on or off (mostly off). Now (June 2001) reborn in a dramatically different form!
sac, the Scott Adams Compiler: a very simple system for producing simple adventure Games, which I made primarily so my eight-year-old son Danny can use it.

More to come ...

Feedback to <mike@miketaylor.org.uk> is welcome!