Scott Adams paints a picture in my head...

In my last blog, I wrote about the Vic-20 and mentioned how I owned a bunch of text adventures for it as a kid. The most memorable ones were created by a programmer named Scott Adams. Not to be confused with the cartoonist that writes Dilbert, this Scott Adams wrote some of the first and most basic [no pun intended] text adventures. Even though Zork is the most popular text adventure from the early days of the genre, Scott Adams' company Adventure International is recognized as the first company to market these games for home use on microcomputers.Commodore Vic-20 games came in cartridge form (pictured below). In my household we had at least 4 different Scott Adams text adventure games: Adventureland, The Count, Pirates' Cove, and Voodoo Castle. Among those 4, it was The Count that got the most attention at home. Since I was about 5 years old at the time, much of the game's vocabulary was consisted of words that I didn't know. If I asked my brother or sister, they would inevitably get sucked into the lure of the game's narrative and end up commandeering the keyboard from me. It would be worse if they had friends over, because then they would gather around the computer and form a fucking committee and start brainstorming on how to progress through the game. One of my brother's friends even spent the whole night trying to finish the game. If memory serves me correctly, he never did.

The plot of The Count was some generic take on the Dracula story. You had 3 days to find and kill the vampire. If you tried to exit the castle, an angry mob kills you and you are forced to start over. There are several incidences in the game where you are attacked and wake up the next day with two small holes on the side of your neck. If that happened 3 times, then the game would end.
Due to the fact that the limited technology only allowed for very specific input commands, the game is fairly hard. If you constructed the input command in a way the program wasn't familiar with, you would have to keep rephrasing the command until you typed it in exactly as the programmer gad intended. This issue persisted for many years in all games that used text input commands, including the Sierra adventure games (King's Quest 1-4, Space Quest 1-3, etc).

If you don't believe me, then you can follow this link to play The Count on the web. The game starts you off in a large brass bed. It should be obvious, but I remember spending a ridiculous amount of time just trying to find the right commands to get out bed. These days, I can't picture myself spending as much time trying to figure out what the game designer had intended for me to do to progress through the game.

Despite the inherent flaws that came with text adventures, their text-only format really painted a picture in my over-imaginative 5-year-old brain. It goes back to the old argument of book vs. film adaptation. A novel will let you make your own interpretations and allow you to mentally visualize the story, while a movie does the interpreting for you. More often than not, you lose something in the process when you view someone else's interpretation.

Here are some links to classic text adventures that you can play straight from your browser window:

• Scott Adams Adventure Games
• Zork
• Bedlam - Another personal favorite from my childhood. It was made for the TRS-80 series of computers sold at Radio Shack.
• A Mind Forever Voyaging (download only)

Adventures in Text

Even as a kid, I made a distinction between console video games and computer games. In the early 80's, my family had a couple of consoles at home (Atari VCS and ColecoVision), which were pretty much under my older brother's authority. I had no say when it came to playing his video games. I assume now that he kept the consoles under his reign because he needed something to do on rainy days after he and his friends got high. I remember spending more time on the Commodore Vic-20 my father had bought. It was a fairly inexpensive computer that was underpowered even for the time, so the focus of their software was gaming and educational software. Despite this early start on computers, I never became that genius wiz-kid my father had envisioned.

Home computers at the time had such a limited graphical capability that a new genre of entertainment software was created: text adventures. These days known as "Interactive Fiction", text adventures are games where all the action is described instead of depicted graphically. A narration on screen describes your (the player's) location and circumstances, then waits for your input (i.e. "look west" or "throw dung at peasant").

These games really allowed my imagination to soar as a kid. I'm sure I gained some good reading comprehension skills from playing these over and over again.

Here's an example of a typical text adventure exchange between the player and the computer:

>look
You are sitting in a chair in a darkened room. The only light source is a bright heat lamp that is dangling from a power cord 2 feet above your head. Your wrists and ankles are fastened to the chair's legs with duct tape. Almost invisible among the shadows, a small figure appears to be smoking a cigarette in the corner of the room.
>examine small figure
I do not understand what you are trying to say.
>examine figure
The figure steps out of the shadows to reveal an angry-looking dwarf wearing a fedora that barely covers his sweaty, bulbous forehead. He takes a drag off of his cigarette before stamping it out under his pointy alligator-skinned cowboy boots. The dwarf then approaches you as he fishes in his pocket, pulls out a butterfly knife, and flips it open in one swift, menacing move. He snarls at you and asks you "Do you want to live to remember the worst day of your life or do you want to die and lose all consciousness for all eternity?"
>eat shit!
This game does not understand "shit."
>hit dwarf
Your hands and legs are taped to the chair, remember? You must break free to move. The dwarf is tapping his feet impatiently.
>talk to dwarf
Right as you open your mouth to talk to the dwarf, he flashes a quick smile and brings a finger to his lips in a motion to shush you. He raises the knife and starts cutting through the duct tape that binds you to the chair. He frees you and, laughing maniacally, runs out of the room through a door to the east.
>east
You are now in a large hallway to what appears to be an abandoned prison. There is an open door to the east. Construction debris blocks the hallway on the south. You can continue down the hall to the north. The smell of sulfur hangs in the air.

Basically it goes something like that although most text adventures don't read like a David Lynch screenplay.

One of the more interesting features of text adventures is the limited vocabulary that is understood by the computer. Typically, input commands were regulated to verb + noun. You would type "open door" to open a door. If you typed "open the door," the computer would start spitting out smoke and sparks because of the complexity of the input command.

The Commodore Vic-20 had a bunch of great text adventures. We had a few at home. I'll tell you more about them in my next post.

Until then, remember: This game does not understand "shit."