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Comment by technothrasher | Hacker News Reader

"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.

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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.

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.

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...

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