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Old 03-01-2018, 11:52 AM   #23
Wormius
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Join Date: Feb 2011
Location: Somewhere down the crazy river.
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Originally Posted by psyang View Post
"You have been eaten by a grue" and "You are in a maze of twisty little passages" are phrases that haunted me.

I still remember where my love for the genre started. My friend was at the university while his dad (a math teacher) was at a conference there. They set him up on a mainframe terminal and he started playing the classic Adventure. He printed out his game, and brought it back - we must have been no older than 10. As I read through his game, something awakened inside me. A whole world you can explore by typing at a keyboard! Needless to say, the first game my friend and I tried to write was an adventure game. We didn't know how to build a parser, but we knew we could write code like:



It was pretty exhilarating. And, yes, the first game was exactly as you described: Two doors, left and right. If you typed "left", you went through the left door and a boulder fell on you and you died. If you typed "right", you went through the right door where you were devoured by a monster. The secret was to type "left " (with a space) which would send you to a different path and you won the game. We made our parents play the game to watch them die. It was pretty funny.
I had a couple of books filled with some BASIC games you could transcribe onto the computer like that.

There was a cool Star Trek one where you explored different sectors and occasionally you would run into Klingons and have to battle them.

https://www.codeproject.com/Articles...Trek-Text-Game

My dad programmed it into one of the computers he had and it was so much fun to play.
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