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Comment by technothrasher | Hacker News Reader

Anybody else fondly remember the earlier Adventure Construction Set from the 1980s? It was similar, though more crude, software but for creating tile based adventure games. I remember breathlessly waiting for it to arrive in the mail one summer when I was a young teen, and then my brother and I spending countless hours creating games for each other to play.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventure_Construction_Set

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I was so excited bringing that box/album cover home from the store. I read the manual through just imagining the games I’d make. When I got home, I put the disk in, and… learned what “minimum system requirements” were, as it wouldn’t run on my PCjr.

And the racing destruction set, and the pinball construction set. Heady days …

...and don't forget S.E.U.C.K.

Ohhh! I missed that! I guess I was too busy playing mail order monsters ...

Yes! Until I saw the box cover illustration, I had totally forgotten that a high-school friend of mine and I worked months to build a Gauntlet clone on our 64K Apple ][+ machines due to the money it was costing us to play it at local game store/nerd magnet, "Dragon's Lair".

There was also _Forgotten Realms: Unlimited Adventures_:

https://www.gogdb.org/product/1432650732

which I greatly enjoyed, and my NWN character, even got a cameo in one fan-made adventure.....

I loved those gold box games. Wanted to get into FRUA, but it just didn't work for me and I didn't have a lot of time to really dig into the details.

Those game editors are tough to build. I worked on Bard's Tale Construction Set and it had a lot of issues. My claim to fame is filing the bug report that led to cut & paste being added to the scripting editor.

It's a lot easier to use if you just find and download adventures made by other folks --- there were a fair number, but not sure if they're still around (I hope so).

What I got into before Adventure Construction Set was Stuart Smith's previous game "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves".

It let you play upto 17 players (locally). Each player would get their turn, in turn, and do their moves, then pass the controller. A slow character might get to move 3 tiles per turn. A fast character 7 tiles per turn. Each character could go in any direction they wanted, the group didn't have to stick together. I played it with 5 people.

Also played it single player. When I got to the end, it challenged you to make it to the end without a single fight. I made it to that end and it had a congrats screen from Stuart Smith.

Also Graphical Adventure Creator for the Amstrad CPC. I loved it, but failed to produce even a single adventure. My perfectionist tendencies made sure any progress ground to a halt almost immediately over text, logic or graphics!

My family had a copy of Graphical Adventure Creator too, I similarly failed to produce anything of note but I do remember having a lot of fun playing around with it and trying to design screens.

I, rightly or wrongly, attribute my love of computers to playing around on the family CPC, I really want to encourage that in my kids but I don't know what the equivalent is - I'm pretty sure it's not buying them a tablet, Raspberry Pi 500 maybe?

Lots of kids still making games with engines like GameMaker Studio!

I think lots of kids will start playing around with Claude Code in this way as well.

I do... 20 minutes on an Apple II for it to create a random adventure, which I found fascinating. I actually have the original in my collection. The games weren't bad, kind of like a decent hobby indie game from today.

And PAW for the Speccy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_Adventure_Writer

There was also STAC for the Atari ST - absolutely loved it. Unfortunately my artistic skills were not up to making anything good.

https://www.ifwiki.org/STAC

Also Eamon for Apple ][, I played with that a lot! And wrote my own in FORTH too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eamon_(video_game)

Good god, 280 Eamon Adventures, last released October 2023, I have a lot of catching up to do:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Eamon_adventures

Same dragon title screen illustration as Odyssey: The Compleat Apventure!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odyssey:_The_Compleat_Apventur...

Also great memories of Richard Garriott's Akalabeth: World of Doom!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akalabeth:_World_of_Doom

An Adventure I wrote in Logo, released on the C64 Terrapin Logo examples floppy, using the Logo REPL as the parser:

https://donhopkins.medium.com/logo-adventure-for-c64-terrapi...

Now I'm creating adventures in Cursor with MOOLLM and working on compiling them to JavaScript to run in the browser, kind of like The Sims meets LambdaMOO meets Cursor:

Adventure MOOLLM Anthropic skill:

https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/tree/main/skills/adventu...

Adventure Compiler design document:

https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/skills/adventu...

Adventure-4 example microworld:

https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/tree/main/examples/adven...

Here's a marathon session playing in Cursor, and making a wish on a monkey's paw for the rest of the monkey:

https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/examples/adven...

Here's an interview where MOOLLM explains itself, then we go on a wild ride with the Irn Bru snowman, with underground embassy intrigue, Columbo style:

https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/examples/adven...

Those links really bring back the memories! I messed around with Akalabeth, Eamon, and Adventure Construction set all three back in the day.

Did you ever play The Prisoner? Where you go to the psychiatrist and he asks you all these questions, then the BASIC program crashes and prints an error message like "SYNTAX ERROR IN LINE ####" and beeps, leaving you at the "]" prompt?

But it's really an AppleSoft Basic Prompt Simulation to see how you will deal with the program crashing, judging you on if you go "CONT" or "NEW" or "RUN" or "CATALOG" or "LIST ####"!

What I didn't realize until I just looked it up now:

>In Prisoner 2 (the 1982 remake of the original), the game intentionally simulates a crash by showing a “Syntax error in line ###” message where the line number is actually your secret resignation code. The idea is that you might try to inspect or debug that line and type in the code, thereby revealing it — which is a loss condition because the game’s entire goal is to not give that number up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prisoner_(video_game)

>The game occasionally breaks the fourth wall by acknowledging that a game is being played.

It sure does!

Wow, no I didn't, but that sounds like a fantastic game mechanic!

I loved that thing. I don't know how many hours I spent on that. I wish I could my kids interested in anything half as creative.

I seem to remember using one called AGT (adventure game toolkit) that I'd obtained from some sort of mail away floppy shareware service or something. It's wild to think of how much has changed in the last few decades!

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