[Coco] Anyone still play text adventure games?

[Allen Huffman]

On May 23, 2011, at 4:08 PM, Aaron Wolfe wrote:

> I started up the server, you can play by telneting to 69.13.218.10 port 6809

Very very cool, Aaron. I love the idea of taking these old text adventure "worlds" and making them multiplayer like that.

Did Sierra Online ever do that with their stuff? That would have been a natural -- and they already had "Online" in their name!

This reminds me of something we had in Lufkin, Texas when I moved there after graduation in 1987. Tim Johns (aka, CoCo Kid) had something called THE ADVENTURE SYSTEM BBS. Tim went to a few CoCoFests, so some may remember him as part of the white van crew. Anyway, the Adventure System was his (never fully completed) BBS that was done like a text adventure.

When you connected, you were in a room, and ultimately you would have done stuff like "open mailbox" and "read mail" to do e-mail. You could move around in the game, and when you came to place with no room, it would say something like "There is nothing here. Do you wish to make a room?" and you could make a new room and add descriptions, exits, etc. It was a fun concept.

A few years later, while I was learning C (with the help of a Commodore 64, later Amiga, friend, Mark Thomas), I had my own version of this as an online game on my OS-9 BBS. Mark basically wrote it, coding it up in K&R C on his (at that time) Amiga, then uploading the source to my OS-9 BBS to compile and run (I miss those powerful shell access days), and it was a similar concept.

I don't remember if it was my system, or Tim's, but we recreated our entire local Lufkin Mall in it :)  Fun stuff.

Boisy, years ago, was creating a CoCoFest game in the Sierra graphics adventure engine. I recall him showing me a few of the screens outside of the old Chicago hotel it was held at for many years. Wild stuff.

Anyway... I have no Internet at home right now (budget cuts) so I am at a public WiFi spot and need to get back to catching up...

		-- Allen