Back in a time when glam-rock was all the rage and everybody had long
hair, William Crowther developed a program called 'Adventure'. He
developed it on a PDP-10 which was a mainframe for companies
worldwide. It allowed him to access a whooping 300kb, which today isn't very much at all even our mobile phones have between 256MB to 8GB but back then it was massive.
Adventure was a cave crawling text adventure, created by William Crowther back in the mid 70's. He designed it due to personal reasons and his exploring Mammoth Cave in Kentucky had come to an end. So if you didn't know: William Crowther is the godfather of text adventures, what followed him was over a decade of text adventure otherwise known as IF (Interactive Fiction). Adventure is also known as Colossal Cave.
Unfortunately I was born a bit late to
experience the birth of text adventures but my first experience came
after my dad bought a ZX Spectrum and one of the first games he had was a
little gem called 'Mountains of Ket" the other was 'The Hobbit'. I must
have been about 4-5 but I remember him playing it, whilst I attempted to
help with the mapping, well I'm convinced he was mentally mapping out
the game rather than depending on my cavechild scribbles which at some
point probably included something which should have been a dog instead of boxes of locations and other important information.
Well after that experience I have always had a great fondness for text adventures, growing up I always looked out for text adventures but sadly they began to die out as the years moved on and I evolved on to point 'n' click games like Monkey Island, King's Quest etc which sadly also seem to have followed the same destiny. Even though there is still an active community within the IF world, it sadly isn't popular as it once was.
Recently I watched a very interesting documentary
called 'Get Lamp' which was created by Jason Scott in 2010 as a follow up to his BBS documentary which ironically enough was called BBS: The Documentary. It gives a full insight into history of text adventures and includes interviews with my personal favourite Steve Meretzky and other at the legendary company Infocom. They had some great games and gave me the joys
of the Zork trilogy, Planetfall, Infidel, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the
Galaxy and Arthur: The Quest for Excalibur. If you find IF enjoyable its definitely worth checking, its an excellent watch.
The way gaming has evolved over the decades it really makes me miss those simple gaming days, they where as hard as they are today but you had to use your imagination and intelligence rather than button bashing your way to glory.. and as Jason Scott quotes "Before the first person shooter, there was the first person thinker." Nicely put.
Additional links:
GET LAMP - Watch the documentary via Youtube
BUY GET LAMP DVD - 2 disc edition, worth it
IF ARCHIVE - Games, Tools, articles and everything for your IF needs
Adventure was a cave crawling text adventure, created by William Crowther back in the mid 70's. He designed it due to personal reasons and his exploring Mammoth Cave in Kentucky had come to an end. So if you didn't know: William Crowther is the godfather of text adventures, what followed him was over a decade of text adventure otherwise known as IF (Interactive Fiction). Adventure is also known as Colossal Cave.
 |
| Mountains of Ket - ZX Spectrum 1983 Tape |
Well after that experience I have always had a great fondness for text adventures, growing up I always looked out for text adventures but sadly they began to die out as the years moved on and I evolved on to point 'n' click games like Monkey Island, King's Quest etc which sadly also seem to have followed the same destiny. Even though there is still an active community within the IF world, it sadly isn't popular as it once was.
 |
| Get Lamp Documentary by Jason Scott 2010 |
The way gaming has evolved over the decades it really makes me miss those simple gaming days, they where as hard as they are today but you had to use your imagination and intelligence rather than button bashing your way to glory.. and as Jason Scott quotes "Before the first person shooter, there was the first person thinker." Nicely put.
Additional links:
GET LAMP - Watch the documentary via Youtube
BUY GET LAMP DVD - 2 disc edition, worth it
IF ARCHIVE - Games, Tools, articles and everything for your IF needs
