When I was a young kid back in the early 1980’s my parents decided that these new fang dangled video games machines would be fun to have but certainly wouldn’t encourage me to do my homework and to study harder so they turned instead to one of the many new and fascinating home computers coming onto the market and this is how I got introduced to the amazing little Commodore VIC 20 and BASIC 2.0.
It was Christmas morning 1981 and there is was, the Friendly computer along with a tape recorder and a couple of games on a cartridge and a manual describing how to plug everything together and what commands it understood.
Well knowing nothing about computers (except for a 20-minute play with an Apple II at school once) I set about following each page and diagram and before I knew it all the leads and connectors had homes and it was ready to turn on.
So what exactly is CBM BASIC V2 and why is there 3583 bytes free…
Ok, it’s on and by the looks of things READY. But really having no idea what to do or type I sat there watching the blinking blue cursor, just hoping something amazing would happen. Well, of course, nothing amazing happened and typing some random words achieved only a vague message stating there was a Syntax Error.
It was this stage that I continue to open the remaining packages, one of them with a huge dragon on the cover. Little did I know but I was opening Adventureland a text adventure game by Scott Adams and soon I’d be hooked. No only on adventure games but the idea of wanting to learn how such programs were made.
So there I was standing in a forest with exits all around and a voice BOOMING out to me. Treasures, adventure and a game that kept me entertained for many hours and when all treasures were safely stored away and the adventure was completed, including a map of everywhere I’d been and everything I’d seen, I was left wondering how was all this possible.
Over the next few months, I read page after page of commands, typed in line after line of example programs and cursed occasionally when errors in my typing caused SYNTAX ERRORS! But it wasn’t too long before I had some working and fun little programs which were great, but none of them were like Adventureland.
Soon I discovered more adventures, a whole series of Computer Classics which loaded in off cassette tape (slowly) and often would pause and need to load in additional information at certain points of the game but nonetheless these were fun.
I wasn’t looking before I ventured off to our local library to see whether they would have any computer books which I could borrow and learn from, maybe type in listings and perhaps information on how to create adventure games. Well, I was in luck, as now only did the library have books, it had two fantastic books on text adventures.
I couldn’t have asked for anything more, two books on adventure games. One of these books showed you how to create them and the other containing listings of complete text adventures including Adventureland by Scott Adams.
Now armed with information on how to makes these amazing little programs along with a number of examples from various authors on how they created adventures I set about creating my very own text adventure in just 3583 bytes of code.