Arctic Adventure: A Lost 1981 TRS-80 Adventure Game | Hacker News Reader

Arctic Adventure: A Lost 1981 TRS-80 Adventure Game

arctic81.com

76 pointsthrowup23829 comments

Around this same time, also inspired by Scott Adams (who I got to thank personally a couple years ago for getting me interested in programming), I played around with making text adventures on the Apple II machines at my elementary school. I never actually made a complete game, but it taught me a lot about BASIC. The year after I graduated from that school, I was back there for some reason, and some of the kids where playing the games I wrote. When I told them I'd written them, they asked me how to solve the "UNDEF'D STATEMENT" puzzle. I felt bad.

HAhahaha! Your program crashed?! What a weird mix of pride and embarrasment that must've been! I can feel it in my bones.

It wasn't even so much a crash as a "ran out of program". The code was pretty simplistic and was basically "player selects option 1, goto line 10, option 2, goto line 20." They selected option 2 and there was no line 20. That's simplifying a bit, but that's basically what happened.

Obviously you should've just told the player they found a secret instead:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9bkKw32dGw

There's a file somewhere in one of the trs-80 model 100 archives that has a name like sexy.ba (filenames are 6.2 and .ba is basic)

When you run it it gives some generic "are you ready to have fun?" kind of message, but then crashes. But it's BASIC so you just go to the crashed line and fix a typo. Run, crashes a few lines later, you fix something slightly trickier like an array index out of range, run,... 3 or 4 of those total and it just ends "You learned how to debug and fix programs! Congratulations! Wasn't that fun?"

I have to say I was actually unreasonably entertained, so hats off to the author.

https://github.com/LivingM100SIG/Living_M100SIG/blob/main/M1...

> I enjoyed writing ARCTIC ADVENTURE and cashing my check. But I never got a copy of the book or any feedback from my audience...

This was my experience also, I wrote a few games about the same time and sold them through computer magazines, but there was no feedback or contact with anyone that ever played them.

A few years ago I was contacted by a person looking for permission to re-write one of my old games for colecovision and it really was an amazing experience to finally get some concrete feedback that someone had actually played my game and enjoyed it.

Honest question - did you "notice" the lack of feedback at the time?

I ask only because I sold a program through the mail on floppy disk, to maybe 5 or 10 users, in the early 90s. I never got feedback, but thinking back I didn't really expect any, so I didn't miss it.

Now of course it's different, but back then, short of writing me a letter (which would be an unrealistic expectation even then) they had no route to feed back.

Put another way, I never sent feedback to any author either, do I guess I had no expectations.

(The obligatory tip of hat to Scott Adams - the first program I ever ran on "my" first computer (my dad's apple ][).

We all live in a pond making ripples, and we very seldom see what those ripples effect. Mr Adams made ripples that are unimaginable - as he built on the ideas of others, so have so many been inspired by his work to forge their own path in tech.

A true giant of history.

> did you "notice" the lack of feedback at the time?

Not really, I wasn't expecting it either. I was having fun creating them and thrilled that a company was willing to sell them, and that people bought them. That alone felt validating that my hard work had produced something of at least reasonable quality.

Even though I hadn't expected it, it was pretty exciting to talk to someone that played one (and liked it).

For my high-school civics class final project, I wrote a 2d-scroller on the TRS-80 in assembler. The game was a map of the high school, and you had to avoid the "losers," "socs," and teachers, and steal supplies from various classrooms, culminating in stealing stuff from the chemistry labs and blowing up the school.

Obviously, 198x was a different time.

I got an A on the assignment.

I have the code somewhere, but I fear even at this late date I'd get thrown in prison if I were to release it.

(2021)

Some more anecdotes and discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28344635

I don't remember this game from back then, but I do remember playing adventure games on the TRS-80 with my aunt being a very formative experience. The TRS-80 was also one of my early introductions to computer programming. I wish I had any records of what code I wrote back then and I can imagine how good it must have felt to be able to dig up and clean up the old code. I do still have 5.25" floppies with a game I wrote in IBM PC Basic somewhere. At one point I had rejection letters from Broderbund and a bunch of other game publishers. It's a lot to deal with all of that as a tween.

I also don't remember this particular game but did play 13 Ghosts on the TRS-80. Both the TRS-80 and the COCO-64 were one of the few good memories I have about my high school experience. These two gadgets got me interested in programming, with BASIC and Assembly Language. I actually got the COCO, an external floppy as well as a cassette recorder for loading and saving the programs I'd experimented with. I had purchased the Editor Assembler cartridge for the COCO. Can't believe I lost that machine when I moved across the country :(

Holy cow. The font on that page is a real nostalgia trigger!! I can almost smell the classroom where I first used Model 1 TRS-80s, and hear the dot-matrix printer in the corner cranking out banners.

Arctic Adventure was my sibling's and my favorite game growing up, when we were gifted an old computer. I spent years in my early adulthood trying to track it down, and finally my sister remembered the name and I found it on archive.org: https://archive.org/details/msdos_Arctic_Adventure_1991

That seems to be the other Arctic Adventure, for DOS: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_Adventure_(video_game...

(I also enjoyed the DOS game, and thought the article might have some relation to it -- but appears not!)

Haha, wow... it was my siblings' favorite game (and mine, too)... I've done a deep dive several times now searching for this game over the years without remembering the name. Finally, after a decade of occasional searches, I found 1991's Arctic Adventure. Thanks!

I "preserved" a (probably somewhat lost) sokoban-like game (from the makers of Sokoban in fact) from the early 1980s as a JavaScript game about a year ago.

https://blog.qiqitori.com/tnt_bomb_bomb/ Check it out if you're interested.

* "probably somewhat lost" as in, not available as a ROM/image anywhere on the internet AFAICT, but some mentions, and even gameplay videos on YouTube

I'm sad I missed this era, but enjoy playing modern interactive fiction immensely.

I didn't follow all of the links, but did not see one that obviously linked to the source code. I'd like to take a look at it. Anyone else find it?

Looking at the page source, it's in /aaweb.bas

That's some pretty terse code. I'm surprised author was able to enhance the game after 40 years.

I wonder what it was about the Eskimo that required bowdlerization. Nothing obvious in the printed source.

Whoa the font on this site is unreadable. Seriously how did y'all do it.

I can't speak directly for the trs80, but on the Apple 2 the aspect ratio of the pixels were different.

So on the screen the font read like a modern font today (at much low res) - but the letters were "square".

When those fonts though are drawn on today's screens they appear tall and skinny. Which makes them hard to read.

From memory, the default text mode for an Apple 2 was 40 wide by 20( 24?) high. (There was also an 80char card that allowed it to be 80x20, but there the text looked skinny.)

So it wasn't as bad then as it looks now. And we had, perhaps, much lower expectations :)

It looked much better on a CRT monitor.

For some reason I read Penguin Adventure (from Konami) and got really excited.

Well, Konami released both Arctic adventure and its sequel Penguin adventure.

I got more confused when I saw the slot machine

Antarctic Adventures I mean :-)

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