My 1981 adventure game is now a multimedia extravaganza | Hacker News Reader

My 1981 adventure game is now a multimedia extravaganza

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128 pointsvontzy47 comments

> Almost nobody programs computers in machine language. Mostly, programmers work in high-level programming languages that simplify many aspects of the job. Thanks to AI, I realized, English is just an extraordinarily high-level programming language. And vibe coding is coding.

It's funny how people feel the need to repeat that last mantra. Kind of similar to the "listening to audiobooks is reading" crowd.

Compare two high schoolers: one who vibe codes a game in English and generates the graphics with Nano Banana; vs one who actually learns how to program and draw to make the game.

Are they doing the same kind of activity? Getting the same kind of cognitive development out of it?

Sure but you could be saying that about calculators vs pen and paper math. At some point you will need to abandon this position.

I think it’s more like solving a math problem yourself (whether with tools like pen & paper, or a calculator), vs asking an AI agent to solve the problem for you.

Right but only because you've mentally tagged using a calculator with "doing it by yourself" and using AI as "not doing it by yourself". In both cases you are doing it by yourself in one sense and not doing it by yourself in another.

In the AI case the "not doing it by yourself" sense is much much much much much much more correct.

It's also valid for calculators vs pen and paper math.

Calculators make calculation much easier, but people doing math with them lose a sizable part of their mathematic skills.

To the point of kids not being able to do a simple addition or multiplication or percentage calculation (never mind division) with a calculator, even when someone used to pen and paper can trivially doing with just their mind.

I think grade school kids learning arithmatics shouldn't use a calculator & highscool pupils/collegue students/junior devs learning to program shouldn't use AI to generate code until they learned how to do it manually for the same reason (the temptation to let the machine do it for you & thus not learn is too great).

Digitally painting an image is completely different from asking an AI to make one. Writing a short story is very different from asking an AI to write it. Same with arithmetics, problem solving, coding.

> Kind of similar to the "listening to audiobooks is reading" crowd.

Is this supposed to be an implicit dig at audiobooks? The scientific consensus seems to be that there's no difference to comprehension or retention.

https://time.com/5388681/audiobooks-reading-books/

Well, we don’t say that “seeing” a theater play is the same as “reading” a theater play - regardless of comprehension or retention - so why should we say that “listening” to a book is the same as “reading” a book?

Drawing these distinctions is complicated by multi-modal consumption. As an avid lifelong reader (nearly a book per week for about 50 years) I greatly enjoy reading on my kindle and seamlessly switching to listening while driving or doing the dishes. With most books these days it's probably 80% reading -- but in the past, when I had a long commute, it was closer to 50/50. When discussing a given book with others, it's practically irrelevant whether I read or listened to the audiobook narration.

As for theater plays, attending a live performance with actors is fundamentally different from reading the script.

Yet it is not the same. The person who has read a thousand books is better at reading than the person who instead listened to them.

Better at reading yes but not necessarily better at comprehension which is what I believe people are getting at in these discussions. I read and listen. Initially my comprehension and memory while listening was inferior, but you can learn the skill of deep concentration on audio (or some may have it natively).

You’re proving the exact point of the OP arguing against the “And vibe coding is coding.” statement.

You’re focusing only on the results, and not the difference in cognitive function necessary to achieve those results.

An illiterate person can “read” an audiobook.

Just like a person that knows zero about coding could (theoretically) vibe code a program with similar/same results.

So yes, if you focus 100% on only the results, then it could be argued they’re the same.

But the OP is saying there’s more to doing something than just the results.

The medium feels wholly immaterial in this case. The words reach your brain, and then it's up to you to think about them, imagine the scene, process ideas. Audiobooks let the narrator add inflection, which maybe takes a slight load off you, but I don't see the big deal. I've read lots of fiction, and listened to a lot on road trips, and I don't feel like my comprehension suffered in either case compared to the other. The important thing is you can have the same level of conversation about the material - I don't believe all this woo about reading being the only pure and intellectual way to process information.

>Is this supposed to be an implicit dig at audiobooks? The scientific consensus seems to be that there's no difference to comprehension or retention

I wouldn't trust that "scientific consensus" if my life dependent on it.

For starters, there's no scientific consensus.

The linked post refers to merely 2 studies, both of doubtful quality. And one says "it's no different", the other says it's worse.

The one that says "it's no different" asked them to read/listen to mere two chapters of total ~ 3000 words.

That's a Substack essay or New Yorker article level, not a book, and only of one text type (non-fiction historical account. How does it translate to literature, technical, theoritical, philosophical, and so on?). The test to check retention was multiple choice - not qualitative comprehension. And several other issues besides.

And on the other study in the post, the audio group performed much worse.

I think GP is making a subtler point, not that listening to audio books is worse than reading books with your eyes, but that it's telling that people who listen to audio books themselves go out of their way to emphasize that it's equivalent to reading, thus betraying that in their own value system they put a higher value on (actual) reading.

I mean no one is listening to an audiobook of an Eternal Golden Braid - even if one existed it couldn't lead to an equivalent outcome compared to reading it. Let's not even get started on the impact on literary devices like Wordplay and Neologisms.

There doesn't need to be an implicit dig; audiobooks are explicitly a different medium, and in the Marshall McLuhan sense obviously thus impact comprehension, retention, and the overall grok.

I'm pretty sure it will vary a LOT from person to person... I remember what I see very well.. what I hear, not nearly as much. I say this as when I was commuting I'd listing to a lot of audio books and podcasts... I didn't retain much at all. But I can skim a written article and retain a lot more. Further still, if I literally copy something I see while writing it down, it's hard for me not to remember. That last bit got me through high school as I never did any homework, but always aced tests.

Everyone is definitely different in terms of how they learn best. That's not to say that listening to non-fiction is or isn't better for oneself than nothing, or even different forms of music may be different. There's nothing wrong with entertainment or factual knowledge... (See "Fat Electrician" on YouTube/Pepperbox for a lot of both.)

> Are they doing the same kind of activity? Getting the same kind of cognitive development out of it?

Definitely not, but one activity isn't necessarily better than the other. A carpenter and an architect don't do the same activities either.

Even if we accept this metaphor of English as a programming language, it’s used in a highly unusual way.

With regular programming, you have a full specification of the program (the code) and it gets turned into an executable. When you want to change some behavior, you change the code parts that relate to the behavior and the whole thing is compiled again.

With agentic programming, there’s no full spec, no “codebase in English”. You write instructions but they are discarded as soon as you close your session, and what’s left is this lower level thing (the code written in a traditional programming language).

It’s almost like a difference between declarative and imperative paradigm for the process of creating software.

> Are they doing the same kind of activity? Getting the same kind of cognitive development out of it?

Who cares as long as the game is good? There is no inherent moral value in the how with artistic creation. What matters is the end result.

And if people are happy with what they produce, who am I to judge them? I will happily give my opinion on the game but the act of creation is them.

Same with audiobook. You are adding value judgment where there doesn't need to be one. Is the Odyssey less significant because it used to be an oral story?

"In high school, I loved playing text-based TRS-80 adventure games written by Scott Adams. Moved to write an Adams-style adventure myself, I set it in the Arctic."

So many of us growing up at that time were inspired by Adams. I think he quite literally is responsible for a huge number of people becoming programmers and game designers. I was lucky enough a few years ago to be able to thank him personally for what he did for me as a kid. He was very gracious and humbly admitted that he gets that a lot.

I count myself among this group. I actually emailed Adams sometime around 1999 or so to ask him a question about a game that I thought was his. Turns out, the game was included in a collection of Adams's games on the TI-994a (the game was called Knight Ironheart) and was in the same exact style and used the same interpreter as his own games.

He was super nice about it, explaining that he didn't actually author that game. We exchanged a few more emails back and forth, but overall a great experience chatting with him over the earlyish Internet. I feel very fortunate that I grew up in an era of computing where it seemed much smaller than it does today.

I have a fuzzy memory of Adventureland and Pirate Island for the 99/4. What delightful times!

One of the highlights of my youth was attending Apple convention in boston in the 1980s and meeting Lord British (Richard Garriot). He saw that I liked the game and asked me to stand in the kiosk and teach people how to play it.

I taught myself to program typing out games and apps from Rainbows magazines in the mid-eighties. I was obsessed with text-adventures, and creating my own, from about age eight and onward.

Playing games back then was a wildly different experience; pre-internet, there was no way to find hints. You'd come to a wall, somehow, and be stuck. I never got to the end of Raaka-Tu, or Madness and the Minotaur, or Bedlam. I wasn't even ten-years-old, and those games were an impossible undertaking.

That said, in 2021, finally got to the end of the first graphical RPG I ever played, Dungeons of Daggorath, and killed the final wizard. I was absurdly pleased with myself that day. That goddamn wizard had been a regret-tinged concern of mine for 39 years.

There wasn't the internet, but there was a book. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Adventure_Games

After a number of very frustrating experiences I ended up buying this. For example, in the Sierra Online game "Dark Crystal", i was absolutely stuck in one spot (ruining my enjoyment of the full game) where I needed to "LISTEN BROOK".

There was another game, (Mad Venture), where I needed to read the book so I could do "THROW DOLL".

> the first graphical RPG I ever played, Dungeons of Daggorath

In case you didn't know Dungeons of Daggorath (1982) for the Radio Shack Color Computer featured significantly in the best-selling sci-fi book "Ready Player One" (although it was not an element in movie). https://readyplayerone.fandom.com/wiki/Dungeons_of_Daggorath

I got my Color Computer in 1982 and banged my head on Daggorath for many hours. Randomly reading Ready Player One in 2012 was surreal. There were so many impossibly obscure references to esoteric 80s computer and arcade trivia that was personally very significant to me - but to almost no one else - it felt like I was being punked by someone that knew me. And the more I read, the more bizarre coincidences kept piling up - from Daggorath on the Coco to knowing how to beat a Joust arcade cabinet with the arcane pterodactyl bug which was only present in Red/Yellow Joust cabinets. The Coco was obscure, maybe 1/100th as popular as the Commodores and Ataris, and Daggorath wasn't even close to a top selling game on it.

In the early 80s, every time I'd go to an arcade I was always on the lookout for a red/yellow Joust so I could drop a high score. I also read Rainbow Magazine every month and even flew across the country to attend the first RainbowFest in Chicago. Good times, indeed.

I had the same experience when I read Ready Player One. Nearly fell out of my chair. But surely dozens of us must have played that game - dozens!

BTW you had to 'incant' a ring, near the end, and I could not have figured that out on my own. It was fantastically fun to me as a kid, despite being, lets be reasonable, impossible to beat without knowing some things outside the game. I actually believed I did beat it, in the late 90s, after I killed the 'false' wizard. However, I thought Level 4 was the game restarting back to Level 1, so exited, thinking it was all done.

Rainbow Magazines were magical and incredibly inspiring. I probably typed-up most of the games they ever published and had them saved on cassette. This one was very lengthy -> https://ia903403.us.archive.org/0/items/rainbowmagazine-1984.... (search for 'Karrak')

Sadly, my brother recorded over it before I could play it more than once ... you know, deliberately, out of pure 80s evil older-brother spite. Some part of me wants to paste that code into Claude Code, and generate some sort of working game, as an act of defiance.

I couldn't play joust on the cabinets (no money as a kid); the TRS-80 game was called Lancer. Good times, absolutely.

Scott Adams (the good Adventure pioneer, not the evil racist anti-vax cartoonist) inspired me too! Check out this Hacker News discussion where he dropped by and answered questions:

The Further Text Adventures of Scott Adams (madned.substack.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29330015

https://madned.substack.com/p/the-further-text-adventures-of...

Here's an email I recently wrote Scott about MOOLLM (like LambdaMoo meets The Sims in Cursor):

https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/designs/email/...

He responded:

Scott> BTW I also captured the original Hacker thread for my biography notebooks. I am using NotebookLM with Gemini and have uploaded many thousands of emails, web interviews, articles etc. I added this in today. For some reason it didn’t seem to have found it before when I was web searching. Been thinking about how I actually want to structure the biography. Was thinking about having mini adventures in the narrative that require folks to play on some webpages I set up to get more of the story. Now I am also thinking about MOOLLM

The essential idea we're both pursuing is "Play My Blog":

Adventure Compiler: Hybrid Simulation Architecture

"YAML-jazz in, playable worlds out."

The adventure compiler is the showcase app that comes after the practical stack: Leela Edgebox DevOps, thinking/writing tools, and Cursor‑Mirror. It is the final attraction — a web app where anyone can play my blog.

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

I've made a lot of progress recently on importing Sims characters:

https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/tree/main/designs/sim-ob...

Here's The Sims character animation system reimplemented in JavaScript:

https://vitamoo.space

https://github.com/DnfJeff/SimObliterator_Suite/tree/main/vi...

This is awesome. Several years ago I found the print-out of an adventure game I wrote in my youth and modified it a bit to work with Chipmunk Basic. It wasn't NEARLY as full featured as Artic Adventure, but this is quite motivating. I'll have to find some time to port the bits of my space adventure to something that can run in a web page.

https://meadhbh.hamrick.rocks/v2/retro_computing/sundog_dot_...

Also... I remembered this existed and might be of interest to people reading the comments here. It's the December 1980 issue of Byte Magazine, archived at the Internet Archive.

https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1980-12

This is the "Adventure" issue, complete with a source listing of Scott Adam's Pirate's Adventure and a Robert Tinney cover illustration. Plus, reviews of commercial games and articles describing the state of the art 46 years ago. Worth a read if you're hip to interactive fiction.

Very nice and I just did the exact same thing recently!

When I was in first or second grade (circa 1982) our family got a TRS-80 Model 3 and I started learning BASIC on it. I built a bunch of small little programs and even started an ambitious project: a full text adventure game called "Manhole Mania!". You, as the player, were a public works employee sent into the sewers to investigate strange noises. I never made much progress, maybe only a few rooms.

Just a couple of weeks ago I had the idea of just pointing Codex CLI at my unfinished game idea and "one-shotting" it. I wrote a fairly detailed prompt, constrained it to use Elm and to make it a static website. Gave a rough outline of a simple, but playable Manhole Mania. 5 mins, 43 seconds later:

https://manhole-mania.com/

Ack! There's a timer! I have to think fast!

Besides the setting of the sewers, the timer is really the ONLY aspect of the original game that I remember!

All of the Scott adams adventures are ported to the ZMachine. If you did so with that, your game would be played everywhere, even more with Puny Inform. Even under old PDA's, Game Boy's, everywhere.

Any IF archive mirror should have these packed into a zip file (look up at Google/DDG with the terms 'IF archive mirror'). Then, search for "Scott Adams" (Ctrl-f) and all of these should be bundled in a zip file (actually, two zip files). In order to play them, there's Lectrote even for Android and maybe Mac and iOS, for PC's there's Frotz for Unix/GNU-Linux and WinFrotz for Windows shines (and it has accessibility options for the blind).

If you are an Emacs user you can just install Malyon from MELPA and play them as if it were another interpreter.

I still have my copy of

https://colorcomputerarchive.com/repo/Documents/Books/Comput...

When your surname is McCracken, you're kinda obligated to write an adventure game...

Direct link to game: https://www.arctic81.com

Blog link seems hugged.

one of the very first text adventures I played as a kid [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_Kingdom_Valley] had static illustrations; I've always thought of it as a nice touch to add to a text adventure. they key difference between that and more modern graphic (or hybrid text/graphic) adventures was that the illustrations were not meant to be informative; you couldn't look at them and find objects to interact with, e.g., they were just there to add to the mood.

I remember seeing "Choose Your Own Adventures" early in the 80s and thinking "Hmm.. Zork sure would be cool if it had a few pictures like the CYOA books." And of course, about a month later I saw the first text adventure with illustrations. I don't think I ever played Twin Kingdom Valley, but after reading the wikipedia page, I sort of want to now. Oh... aha!

https://archive.org/details/d64_Twin_Kingdom_Valley_1987_Bug...

Not gonna lie - that actually is impressive.

scott adams write the first comment...

Very cool to see him there, and that he's not afraid to keep his skills current.

It's a shame he never reached the level of fame and cultural influence that the other Scott Adams achieved.

He wrote the first (top rated) comment in this Hacker News discussion too:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29330015

Put on the coat… put on the diving suit… came out of the ocean.. tried to put the coat back on. (Thought I would have taken it off)

“ The breeder talks up her dog-grooming services.”

Hey, look at me big hunting.

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