Adventureland

At the age I was, I got hours and hours of fun out of Adventureland ... 's demo. As sparse as the text was, as weird as the puzzles were, and as unsolvable as many of them proved to be in the demo, it still felt like I was being drawn into a vibrant world of the imagination. I loved it. I loved the things that I imagined happening off the edges of the map, and I loved the idea of a world where dragons take their sleep of ages in random meadows and jewels and objets d'art could be found hiding everywhere you look.

There are lots of things in Adventureland you wouldn't see much after the ascendance of Infocom. Ridiculously varied landscapes where the entire biome changes each time you take a short jog. Treasures lying out in the open, marked so you can tell them from dross items. Single-move puzzles where you just have to bring the right item. And absolutely bizarre moments like dealing with the bear.

In 1980, Zork would hit the commercial markets and instantly become a "killer app." But Adventure International would keep publishing games until 1984, because there was still a market for this kind of minimalist, constrained narrative experience. And, looking back on it, I can see why; it's like comparing the experience of an Atari 2600 game and a Playstation 4 game. It's not that the modern game is "better" because it's more sophisticated; the two are just different.

This was, I believe, the first commercial text adventure. Certainly the first successful one; although Adventure and Dungeon were much more descriptive, this game fit on everyone's systems.

Gargoyle can play this game if you change .dat files to .saga. Scott Adams' website has an interpreter for these games as of 2017.

This game is ultra-minimalistic, with room descriptions often empty or as short as possible. The parser takes only two words at a time; only the first three letters of each word are read.

The game is actually quite fun, especially if you're willing to spend a long time playing around with it. It achieves the 'long time'-ness by having several situations that lock you out of victory without you realizing it, and by requiring a lot of combinations of items.

Before I played it, I thought it was an Adventure rip off, but they are very, very dissimilar. It's like the way that Antz and A Bug's Life are similar, or Monster's Inc and Shrek. They are vaguely similar, but not really.

I can remember when I first sat behind my C64, I was young and hooked on this game. Though it hasn't aged that well I can still sit down and play this for hours at end. If you haven't played this piece of history I say you should. It's a nice look back to what the past was like.