Today’s post you could think of as a “bonus game”. It appears in the April 1983 edition of Personal Computer World, followed by the first issue of Personal Computer Games that summer (same publisher) and is directly next to the game I was going to be writing about next.
To explain in context, when the Sinclair ZX80 (and ZX81) came out, they had only 1K worth of memory by default, an absolutely miniscule amount to do much of anything with. Companies still put out tapes and books intended for that target memory size, the most significant from this blog being from Alfred Milgrom (of The Hobbit) and the duo behind Pimania, who started their game publishing with experimental 1K games. Adventure in Murkle was in the same spirit but in a much more generous 4k.
Adventure in 1K is the only game, article, or product of any kind I can find by Ian Stansfield which will “run on any micro you care to name”. Instead of being like the games above, well, let’s just give a transcript–
YOU ARE IN A CAVERN…
NORTH, SOUTH, EAST OR WEST?
E
YOU ARE IN A CAVERN…
NORTH, SOUTH, EAST OR WEST?
W
YOU ARE IN A CAVERN…
NORTH, SOUTH, EAST OR WEST?
S
YOU ARE IN A CAVERN…
NORTH, SOUTH, EAST OR WEST?
E
YOU ARE IN A CAVERN…
NORTH, SOUTH, EAST OR WEST?
E
YOU ARE IN A CAVERN…
NORTH, SOUTH, EAST OR WEST?
Q
YOU ARE IN A CAVERN…
NORTH, SOUTH, EAST OR WEST?
X
YOU ARE IN A CAVERN…
NORTH, SOUTH, EAST OR WEST?
You get the idea. It’s simply printing the text, taking an input, and then looping, without even bothering to read what the player entered. As a courtesy, both BASIC and C source code are provided. (This is the first time I’ve ever seen source for a type-in given in C!)
“Hours of fun and entertainment for all the family.” So yes, this is a joke game, not just on adventures but on the concept of selling 1K games, but it’s the sort of meta-textual joke came I had thought (before embarking on my journey) would not show up until much later, as a Usenet joke from the 90s or an entry into the TWIFcomp (which asked competitors to fit an interactive fiction game into a tweet, 140 characters). However, by this point I’m not surprised, because we’ve had…
- Crystal Cave include a “realistic” cave where the treasures break if you touch them and a park ranger throws you out
- Stuga drop into a choice-game section involving the Muppets
- Acheton put in the classic grate-opened-with-keys to start, but where entering immediately kills the player
- House of Thirty Gables skewering multiple adventure game conventions all at once, including a troll you aren’t supposed to kill
…such that meta-textual play with the whole concept of the adventure happened almost immediately. It’s with this sort of metatextual play that you eventually get the “escape room” concept (where the entire game plays out in a single room, like Suveh Nux) or the “single turn” concept (where the game resets after a turn, allowing many stories, like Aisle) or even the “one puzzle” game where there’s no limit to moves but the only obstacle is a single puzzle (my own game More fits in that category).
So this is worth marking down as a historical footnote, at least. (We incidentally will see not just one but two serious “single room game” efforts in 1983.)
COMING UP: The actual type-in I meant to do, followed by Suspended.
Renga in Blue 