"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.
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)
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":
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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?
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.
17 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 41.7 ms ] threadSo 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.
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...
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/
https://meadhbh.hamrick.rocks/v2/retro_computing/sundog_dot_...
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.
Blog link seems hugged.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29330015
https://colorcomputerarchive.com/repo/Documents/Books/Comput...
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?
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.
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?
“ The breeder talks up her dog-grooming services.”
Hey, look at me big hunting.
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.