re: #417 WindUpBird

I was down with the Infocom games! I didn’t have a C64 as a kid, I had it’s competitor, the 8-bit Atari computer. I had Planetfall, Stationfall, and a whole bunch of Atari ST/Amiga era text adventures like Jinxter, The Pawn, Guild of Thieves… all of which were practically impossible because they were british and sort of relied on a certain familiarity with British culture and jokes that my 12 year old brain didn’t have. I started getting into computer games right around when the Sierra games were becoming big, so lots of Kings Quest, Space Quest, etc as well.

There;s actually an entire subculture of people who still make text adventures, they call them ‘interactive fiction” now, and there’s toolkits and parsers to make them and run them on about any machine imaginable.

I did it the old fashion way… coded it from scratch… with a parsing subroutine that took all the possible inputs, check where you were, what you had at the moment, and when you could go… decided if you could do something, set all the need flags in memory… and you were on your way to your next move.

Had subroutines that would fire “random” events. I love to build the “I don’t know what you mean” parser… you start building in all kinds of snide comebacks to stupid and snide input. A foul language parser… “Say that one more time and you will be sorry” and the games suddenly aborts… it makes you feel like a little god, manipulating all that stuff.

I know Infocom pioneered the text adventure engine, it was something that could run on most 8 bit platforms of the time, with little modification.