SRHuston Dot Net

He spoke of lands not far, nor lands they were in his mind

–Yes, “Wonderous Stories”

As I’ve been getting into more retro computing (see thing one and thing two), there’s some things that a lot of people ask when I mention the new equipment. One of the first was “does it run ZORK?” While the answer is yes, Zork isn’t a game I ever really played – just kinda knew about it. Again, it predates my start in computers a little, and while it did still exist in other forms I didn’t hear about it until much later when the shine wasn’t as bright for me. But there was a game that I played a lot of, and I found it was there. First, a little history.

When I was a kid, a friend of mine had an Atari 800XL 8-bit computer. We would play with it a lot when I came over to his place, and a couple times he brought it over to mine when we’d have a sleepover. Lots of games on there that I remember playing and enjoying. At one point, he was looking to part with it – he wanted money for something else and hadn’t been using it anyway – and I happily offered to help. The transaction completed and I became the proud owner of it and a wealth of accessories (tape drive, disk drive, large box of floppy disks, even a few cartridges). I still have it all today, and have shown it to the kids, but the video output leaves a bit to be desired anymore and so while we still play Atari things we do it with the Retropie system running the atari800 emulator.

Well one of the games in there I really enjoyed, even though I wasn’t very good at it. It was called “Jewels of Darkness” and contained three text-based adventures that had 8-bit graphics drawn on the top of the screen like a storybook. The first of the games in that group was called the Colossal Caves Adventure, and I’d heard about it a little bit even back then but didn’t know much overall. So flashing to recently as I’m looking at some of the history for the Altair and the PDP, and I see mentions about Adventure. I dug in a bit more to find that Adventure was written on a PDP and spread out in the early days of the ARPANET, and eventually found its way into many platforms and systems including personal computers. As I was reading about some of the versions, I saw a familiar name: Roberta Williams. I knew her name well, as the founder of Sierra Games and creator of King’s Quest, one of the first games I played when we were getting our first computer (an IBM PCjr, the system for which the first King’s Quest game was created). Turns out Roberta got into gaming in part because of Adventure, and in 2023 she wanted to share that with others. Enter “Colossal Cave“, a first person 3D game which takes all of the gameplay from the original game and wraps it around wonderful landscapes and room designs and brings it to a new light. Once I saw this – and that it was available on the PS5 – I wasted no time adding it to my cart and checking out.

I spent the day playing through, and remembering how far I’d got in previous runs as a young one. Not very far, it turns out, because I never made detailed maps (which is almost a requirement) and wouldn’t notice things in the description enough to know there was something I should do. But when the game auto-maps areas as you enter them, and you can physically look around to see what’s in the space and what you could interact with, it’s a whole different kind of experience. On my first playthrough, with only having to remind myself of a few things (where is that damned trident anyway) I only fell short of a perfect score because I opted for the instructions at the beginning, which deducts 5 points. But not only did I have an immense amount of fun playing, I know at least one of the kids is interested in playing as well because it’s a puzzle type game that he can intuit from clues around what to do – like Hello Neighbor without absolutely needing to go find a walkthrough on IGN because there’s a valve handle hidden under the third potted rose, which there’s no way you could have ever known without looking it up.

Looking forward to starting Adventure up on the PDP soon and playing it as the original text game. Maybe I’ll even fire up Jewels of Darkness again and see what some of those half-screen images look like since I know I didn’t get to the end before. Then I guess I’d better start on Zork…