OT: adventure

[Vaughn Treude]

On Thu, 2006-09-14 at 21:02, Darrin Chandler wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 14, 2006 at 08:50:57PM -0700, Josh Coffman wrote:
> > Wow.. yep, going back to the 'good ole days'. I assume
> > plenty of remember the old Text Adventure games. I
> > think the one I used to play was colossal cave. I
> > don't remember whether that was on the Apple II,
> > Commodore, or something else.
> > 
> > I never did solve that darn game, and it has irked me
> > ever since.
> > 
> > http://www.rickadams.org/adventure/
> > 
> > ahh. memories.
> 
> I first played colossal cave on a mainframe. Later I played Zork on my
> first PC (not my first computer; that was a Sinclair ZX-80). I solved
> neither colossal cave nor Zork. Many hours of fun, though! About 10
> years ago I managed to wrangle the email address xyzzy at plover.com which
> I kept for many years. Eventually I gave it up after it became too
> spam-laden. :(

I encountered the text Adventure game when I was working at Honeywell
Residential Group in Minneapolis in the early 1980's.  It was installed
on our department's development system (National Instruments, I think)
which was probably running something Unix-like (I was a hardware guy
back then, so I actually don't know.)  We only played it on our lunch
hour, but we were eventually forbidden to do so because our manager was
afraid that that his bosses would think we were goofing off.  :-(  My
fondest memory was of the dragon which could not be dispatched with any
weapon we were carrying.  Finally in frustration one of us typed in
"kill dragon" and the game said, "I can't believe it!  You killed the
dragon with your bare hands!"

Vaughn