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A History of Early Text Adventure Games
HFKap writes "The earliest computer games were pure text and were passed around freely on the ARPANET, culminating in the 'cave crawls' Adventure and Dungeon. The advent of the home computer opened up a commercial market for text adventure games, though the limited resources of these machines presented significant technical problems. Many companies vied for success in this market, but the best-remembered today is Infocom, founded by a group from MIT. Infocom's virtual memory and virtual machine innovations enabled them to design extremely ambitious and creative games, which they dubbed Interactive Fiction (IF). Ultimately the text game lost its paying customers to the lure of graphical games, such as those produced by Sierra On-Line. This article is a dialogue between Harry Kaplan and Jimmy Maher, editor of the modern IF community's pre-eminent e-zine SPAG."
TUCKER LOSES A FILM REEL HILARITY ENSUES PART II
(In part one Tucker was telling a sold out IHTSBIH crowd in San Diego about how the Rudius crew and his Navy Seal buddies were raising hell and accidentally destroyed a reel of the film. In his "true story" it's 3:00am and Tucker has just pulled the tour bus into the parking lot of the San Diego Zoo)
"So I pull the fucking bus into the zoo's parking lot. The bus has all these fucking gears and I'm just beating the shit out of the engine. Since we were Tucker Max drunk at that point I decided to park the bus across 15 handicap spots. Who the fuck brings retards to a zoo anyway? (mocks retard voice) 'I wannaz dee munkeee!!!!"
THE CROWD ROLLS WITH LAUGHTER
"Fuck. Note to self. San Diego is full of sick motherfuckers!"
THE CROWD CLAPS AND STOMPS FEET
"Hold on, you're going make me lose my place. Ok, right, so we're fucking in the parking lot of the San Diego zoo at 3am. We get off the bus to stretch our legs and I look over at Nils. He is in shock and pointing at something. Was he looking at a copy of USA today announcing Pizza Hut Chapter 11? Who the fuck knows. So I turn around to see what the fuck and there underneath the bus are a set of legs. Holy shit, I fucking ran over somebody. Not HIT someone. Not drove NEAR someone. But actually fucking DROVE OVER THEM WITH A 8000 POUND TOUR BUS!"
THE CROWD LAUGHS
"I went over and started kicking the legs and shit. Nothing. Finally Terror and Mondo went over and dragged the body our from under the bus by its feet. Holy shit. It's like a fifteen year old kid. I almost felt bad. He was toast."
THE CROWD SIGHS, AWWWWW
"Hold your awwwws you fucking pussies. The kid was Mexican!"
THE CROWD EXPLODES WITH RELIEF LAUGHTER
"Terror looked down at the body and says; swear to God, he says 'Looks like someone was trying to steal your axle, Max!' I fell to the ground laughing, tears rolling down my face. After a few minutes we tried to collect our thoughts. Being Green Berets and shit Terror, BroHawk and Mondo did the only natural thing they are trained to do in these situations. They took camera-phone pictures of themselves resting their nutsacks across the dead kid's forehead. It was a fucking Kodak moment."
THE CROWD BELLY LAUGHS
"You should see the photos. Fuck. I'll try to get them on the blog tomorrow or some shit. Terror has perfect fucking nuts, man, shit. Like two hardboiled eggs wrapped in fucking panty hose."
THE CROWD MURMURS
"What? I'm a stickler for detail and shit."
MORE LAUGHTER
"So now here we are. Drunk and at the zoo. I want to go fuck with some animals but we have a fucking wetback body we need to deal with. I forced Tando and Ryan Holiday to bring it inside the tour bus. Terror and Mondo propped the fucking body in a chair and rigged its jaw with string and tape so that as they watched ESPN playbacks on TIVO they could make the dead Tonk mouth the words. Like I said, I'm not even the coolest one of my friendses."
GUY IN CROWD YELLS "I FUCKING HOPE SO"
"Excuse me; are you a fucking dude or a chick?"
THE CROWD EXPLODES WITH LAUGHS. TWO PARAMEDICS WHEEL IN A STRETCHER JUST IN CASE
"I decided I had enough ESPN and set out for the zoo. As I made my way to the zoo gates I was approached by a security guard. Only it wasn't a security guard, it was a hot chick. She was in her forties with a nice round ass and big tits. She had tears in her eyes. 'Are you like fucking okay and shit?' I said to her. She said 'no.' From her accent and skin color I could tell she was Mexican. I had two obvious choices. Do I fuck her in the pussy of the ass?"
THE CROWD CHANTS "ASS ASS ASS ASS"
"Calm down you SD motherfuckers. Last chick I fucked in the ass was Bob Gosse. ..ahh---oooohhh.."
(Tucker does an Andrew Dice Clay rim shot "ah-ooohhh" but it's so high-pitched that is sounds more like an eleven year old girl's reaction to seeing a spider)
"Then she said the magic words. 'Can you help me find my son?' "
(TO BE CONTINUED)
Dwarf Fortress -- a modern ASCII-graphics game.