In the category of “latent genres you never even realize existed”, I bring you: Nightmare Park.
Nightmare Park, by Bob Chappell, first appeared as a type-in in the August 1980 issue of Personal Computer World. You are an ASCII character on path trying to escape a park.
As you step along the path, you encounter mini-games that can kill you. Some of them are games of skill.
In this game you dodge left and right.
Some of them are just a random chance to kill.
In this game you are supposed to just stand still and hope the death rays don’t hit you.
The whole package is compact and weirdly compelling.
The Youtube video I have linked above by 9Pix9 has quite a number of comments of people who remember the game well:
This is the first computer game I ever played.
One of the first games I ever played on the school Commodore PET.
My school had two Commodore PETS and every lunch kids would gather round to play this game.
I remember this game. It was one of the first programs that I ever hacked. I added a section called “Themadoll’s ghost” to it at Derby College. I think it’s what convinced me to change my career from Mech Eng. to Computers
A quote from Adam Dawes made a C64 port (which I used for my own screenshots, as I was unable to procure the PET version):
It undoubtedly played a part in shaping my life and career, and it’ll always hold very special memories for me.
As further evidence of the game’s influence, there were enough variations that there’s a whole category at the Complete BBC Micro Games Archive of various clones.
It became a genre in itself, and I honestly can’t think of anything quite comparable. This is a game where you might just die by bad luck, yet the slot machine forms a part of the experience. The closest modern analogue I can come up with is something like the Mario Party games, but those are multiplayer.
I bring all this up because one of the versions of Nightmare Park, made for Acorn Atom, was by Steven Mark Probyn.
And that is all the biographical information we have on him, other than that the next year he wrote Seek for the BBC Micro and had it published through Micro Power.
From an ad for Killer Gorilla. Seek is in small print to the left, selling for £5.95.
If that publisher sounds familiar, it is likely either you a 1980s-era Acorn diehard or you read my write-up not long ago of their game Adventure, not to be confused with any other Adventure, especially with the princess who keeps running away when you’re trying to rescue her and where the game punishes you for typing STEAL COIN rather than GET COIN even though at the world-level both describe exactly the same action.
“Search the surrounding countryside for hidden treasures and items of value,” we’ve been there before. The only unusual thing up to here is that every item in the game counts as a treasure, so you want to put absolutely everything (including a rope and a lamp) in the starting room to win the game.
At the very start I thought I might finally get an absolutely-plain game, one with almost nothing interesting to observe other than than feeling a bit sloppy (see: no space after the period) but once I got going things felt very, very, odd. Yes, “smell of adventure”, yes, castle with a river, yes, nearby cave.
I thought it a little odd the goblin doesn’t get mentioned in the room description above, but it wasn’t until a bit later I really caught onto what was going on.
You see:
a.) the obstacles are in all cases between rooms; you only get blocked or have death happening trying to travel in a direction
b.) while some other verbs are recognized, your best bet with every single item in the game is to USE it; for example, early on you can find a CUDGEL which works against that goblin, and an axe that works against the dwarves
c.) (which is truly the weird thing) except for item placement in rooms or inventory, the game is entirely stateless; if you kill a goblin at an exit, it will still be there, if you kill dwarves with an axe and walk in that direction (“You trample over bodies”) when you return you have to do it all over again, multiple dwarven massacres one right after the other
This applies also to more ordinary actions, like unlocking doors with keys — doors never stay unlocked, and if you bridge a river with a plank, it will always be removed after crossing.
Parts a-c.) had bizarre narrative effects, mainly serving to make the entire thing seem like a meta-exercise, like I was playing a board game with cards rather than participating in a story.
There was quite a bit of instant death, the most creative being a treasure you see in the distance where you fall and die if you go for it (there is no treasure). However, some of the instant death directions are actually puzzles to solve, and it is hard to tell when something is solvable and when it isn’t; you just need to cart your current pile of objects over and start testing with USE.
For example, trying to go east here kills you via wolf; for a while I assumed (before I caught the general structure of the game) that this meant the exit was permanently closed off. Once I started applying USE in places, I was able to apply a spear:
This is strange as narrative; the elves are always in the room, consistently warning you about wolves you can’t see, and somehow, when picking USE on the right item, you are able to attack a wolf that you still can’t see and chase off other wolves. This obstacles-in-the-connections paradigm essentially dropped any sense of world modeling, but the game was able to wrap a story in anyway. While you can’t just dive in the river by the castle (death) you can work your way around an alternate way and find some guards by a drawbridge. Trying to USE a weapon just states “NOTHING HAPPENS.” Since they are gambling, USE MONEY works:
I admit this took me a while to find; even though I had realized by this point that “every item counts for points, nothing is destroyed”, once I found “money” I immediately and instinctively wanted to hoard it back in the starting area, rather than use it for a puzzle. I was afraid I’d lose it (like throwing a treasure to the troll in Crowther/Woods Adventure) but the money doesn’t go anywhere; if you want to pitch a narrative on, you can just assume there’s so much money it doesn’t matter if you spend some of it on the guards.
(Or you win at gambling. The game doesn’t describe much. Very odd for the BBC Micro, and I suspect maybe it is a port from Atom somehow? But no Atom version exists. There was an Electron port by someone entirely different years later who rudely scrubbed the original author of Steven Mark Probyn and put their own name, D. W. Gore.)
Inside the Castle, it is possible to get chomped by zombies (use a torch), killed by a basilisk (use a mirror) or fall into a pit (use a pole, to pole vault I guess?)
Past the basilisk you can find a sword, which you immediately need because right after that is the King’s Chamber where the King is ready to fight. Of course everything is static and determined by moving in a direction, so the way the logic actually goes is: if you try to go south, you get stabbed and die; if you USE SWORD first, you kill the king and then can go south immediately afterward. You can sit and stare at the king for as long as you want, or even USE SWORD repeatedly because it doesn’t keep track if the king is really alive or dead, just if you can go south.
The last, trickiest part involved a tomb. The way to get in was to USE a CHARTER that was right at the start of the game. I don’t know what action using a charter even constitutes here; waving it in the air to prove I have the right to go in?
The tomb, however, is one way, and when I took the screenshot here I turned out to be trapped. I needed to be carrying a ring (another “looks like a treasure” item) which magically allows escape when used while inside the tomb.
Once I got the hang of the system it was essentially fun; I don’t think this would hold up for more games that well, though, especially with the weird circumstances like the king. Having an adventure in a nearly static world loses quite a bit of the point of adventuring, but I did find myself thinking it slightly unusual ways (“was this deathtrap really a deathtrap? am I allowed to use the cudgel twice? am I allowed to use poison even though I can only hear rats but can’t see them?”)
The cover art has almost nothing to do with the game.
Also, while that intro regarding Nightmare Park was originally meant to just be an aside, it does seem a little relevant here. Nightmare Park, other than the player’s location, is essentially stateless: you move along a board hoping that the next mini-game won’t kill you. The death comes not in standing in place but moving to the next step. Seek feels like it was written along a similar line, and I do get a sense that one influenced the other.
Pole + pit also took a while to find, and it’s strange that you only get warned about the pit after using the pole, since using the pole would presumably need knowledge that the pit was there.
Renga in Blue 
Though it would become a genre in itself, my theory is that text games appeared just because graphics were not available or easily available.
It doesn’t really have to be in text. I’ve never seen a graphical version before though.
I do think it would appear really bizarre to a modern player to have “pick 1 of 3, if you pick wrong you die and game over”. It works here because the game is supposed to be about 10 minutes and it is like a slot machine. If you die you just try again.
But even with modern roguelite mechanics (Hades getting out of the river every time he dies) having a death element that is *pure* chance doesn’t seem congruent to modern play.
“It became a genre in itself, and I honestly can’t think of anything quite comparable. This is a game where you might just die by bad luck, yet the slot machine forms a part of the experience. The closest modern analogue I can come up with is something like the Mario Party games, but those are multiplayer.”
Roguelites and to a lesser extent, roguelikes definitely fall into this category. That luck is part of the game, where you might be doing pretty well, but just end up with bad luck some time or another and find yourself against the superkillmurder dude who shoots 600 missiles a second/turn without the super bomb. Or just plain bad luck through attrition.
Actually, that metaphor seems appropriate, considering that this game sounds like the biggest killer of dwarves until Dwarf Fortress hit the internet.
Theoretically in a roguelike death should be the player’s fault (even if it is a failure or preparation); e.g. you have a random chance of tumbling down stairs while holding a basilisk corpse with gloves in Nethack and having it touch you and turn you into stone, but it is your fault for trying to do that in the first place. In practice there’s sometimes the superkillmurder dude.
(I think the exception is original Rogue, from the same year as Nightmare Park — that one definitely gets no-win situations.)
But yeah, I think if anything carries forward this kind of idea, it is roguelikes. Still can’t imagine one of those having a “stand still and wait for the animation to happen and see if you die” room. (The death rays are weirdly tense and necessary for Nightmare Park, I wouldn’t take them out. I still can’t quite explain it.)
With Seek you could technically be a “dwarf pacifist” but I didn’t discover the alternate route until pretty late. I waded through (I think) five mountains of dwarf corpses for my playthrough.
The minigames look exactly like the minigames in Undertale.
It is unlikely that Toby Fox (born in 1991) would have encountered this game, but especially with the “dodging” you are absolutely right. It does seem to be the natural result of an ASCII-adjacent aesthetic.
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I am the author of Seek for the BBC Micro A/B in 1982, and am quite flattered by your analysis and comments on my game. In case you are interested, here is some background information to the game?
I wrote the game over 3 days when I was studying for my A-levels in 1982. We had Commodore Pets at school, so maybe I had seen a text based adventure game there, I really can’t remember. I also used to read the magazine Personal Computer World occasionally. Anyway, I wrote the game simply as a personal challenge to see if I could write an adventure game, working out how the game engine could use data statements which defined the locations within the map and how you could move between locations.
I showed the game to a school friend, Mark Atherton, who said it was actually quite good and could be commercial. (By the way, Mark later went on to write the Autoroute car routing software, which Microsoft later acquired from him and he then moved to Seattle, so I heard.)
I sent Seek to Program Power / Micro Power who said they would like to take it on. I received 20% commission on every sale, which more than paid for my BBC Micro a couple of times over the next few years! The cassette sold for about 6 pounds, I remember.
At that time, there were very few games available, we had to write our own to be able to play anything. I kept the memory size small enough for the BBC Model A so it could be used by A or B owners – many commercial games were for the Model B only.
Program Power added their own start screen to Seek, with the introductory text and the instructions. They also asked me to add a message, “I don’t understand”?, which was missing in my original. I apologise for the no space after period in one of the messages – that shouldn’t have slipped through!
Yes, you are right to say that text based adventures come into existence because of computer hardware restrictions. RAM and graphics were were is very short supply. Also, it’s easy to write such a game in BASIC, but for any serious graphics game you had to program in assembly language. Later, I did write sprite moving graphics functions for BBC Micro in assembly, but it is very time consuming and I never successfully worked out how to write a game engine in assembly. C was not really available at that time, and would have been too big for the BBC Micro in any case.
Prior to my BBC Micro, I did have an Acorn Atom, for which I wrote and sold a few small games via magazine classified adverts, a surprising number posted to Holland for some reason. But I never transferred Seek to the Acorn Atom myself, since I had to sell my Atom to afford the BBC Micro. My Atom was very RAM restricted in any case, I think 2kB. I don’t think Seek would have fit in my Atom’s RAM.
Program Power did ask me to write another 2 sequels to Seek, but I unfortunately never got round to it. It was the development of the game engine which had interested me, and so using the same engine but with other text in the location map descriptions just wasn’t interesting for me to work on.
I hope that has been useful, since then I worked as a hardware engineer and software engineer. I am currently working on solar energy systems, which hopefully is a useful contribution to the planet ;-)
Wonderful to hear from you!
Could I ask if I was right at all about Nightmare Park being an influence?
I’m also otherwise curious how you arrived at this design (where everything happens between the rooms, which is very different than anything else from this era I’ve played) but I understand if it is too long to really remember. It feels like an aftereffect of some decision based on making an engine but there’s more to it than that it’d be great to hear.
Hi Jason, sorry for the slight delay in answering your message now – although not quite as long as the 41 years since I wrote Seek in 1982!
I just looked at Nightmare Park on YouTube, and I’m really struggling to give a definite answer whether or not I played it in the day. The name rings a very distant bell, but I honestly can’t be sure. We were lucky enough to have Commodore PETs at school from 1979, thanks to a very forward thinking maths teacher, Mr Park, so there is a chance I could have briefly seen the game.
I have also had a look at the source code for Seek. As you say, the action does take place between the rooms. In the code, when you try to move to another room, the game engine then decides what will happen – either something good, bad or nothing at all (i.e. move not allowed). That really is the simplest way to make an action happen, since the player wants to do a move (called an ‘event’ in programming language) and then depending on the next room (known as ‘state’ in programming language) which you are trying to get to, an action happens as you enter the new room/’state’.
Looking back with my current knowledge of programming, the game engine in Seek is a state machine, with rooms being the states, and the events being ‘move’ or ‘get’ etc. It’s easy to make the action happen as you enter the new state. It would have also been possible to, for example, make the action happen at some random time while you are in a state (room), but more complex to program and not so elegant.
I hope that makes sense. I think in Seek, I mainly chose the most straightforward way to write a text based adventure, but there is a possibility I could have also seen the game Nightmare Park on one of the PETs at school beforehand…
Wishing you all the best with your adventuring! Thanks for the amazingly comprehensive website – it’s a gem!
Steven
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