Wander (1974) – a lost mainframe game is found | Hacker News Reader

Wander (1974) – a lost mainframe game is found

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55 pointswodow11 comments

This game is not only an early text adventure -- it is early interactive fan fiction. See Keith Laumer's Jame Retief stories: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jame_Retief

The CDT, Mr. Magnan -- the whole scenario is straight from Laumer's work. Fan fiction inspires all great things :)

I have a copy of this (Peter Langston's Wander C source code) from a 1980 distribution.

I don't think it was ever "lost", it just became gradually more obscure over time, as most things do.

Edit: Looking closer, I see that Langston's 1980 distribution also included Empire (PDP11 object files, not source! -- infamously), "Fast Food" (with C source), and "Star_Drek" -- object files again)

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_adventure implies Adventure was first in "around" 1975, but this blog post says WANDER was 1974.

Oregon Trail was first a sort of text adventure when it was put together in 1971. You didn't navigate rooms, though, so it wasn't exactly the same thing.

Wikipedia is notorious in the video game history community for its lack of accuracy and vague primary sources.

I think Wikipedia is notorious for that in general, along with constant subtle bias (of whoever won the pissing contest in the discussion page) in just about every article.

In this case, Wikipedia's citation leads (via an intermediate hop) to an academic article that dates Adventure to 1975-76, and argues that a date of 1972, which some other sources had previously mentioned, is incorrect: http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/001/2/000009/000009...

Last I checked Don Woods was at Google so someone there could just ask him.

It's a game authoring environment. The example game is from 1977, so earlier games may or may not have been in Adventure style.

> Sure enough, after a little tweaking

Just a reminder, the ESA would like to make this a crime.

Edit: the source was retrieved from the original author. I stand down.

This is great! I look forward to seeing the original (and modified) source code released. I love old text adventure games.

If you want to try your hand at another obscure, early text adventure, there's a version of Warp (early 1980s) hosted here:

http://empire.openmpe.com/empire/other_games.html

(You have to access it through telnet.)

It's a huge game with a very advanced parser, but it only runs on the HP e3000 and the source code has never been released. This is another one I'd like to eventually see the source code to, but I tried contacting one of the authors and got no reply.

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