Asio City

These are the most recent games added to the database and a small correction. (read more...)

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If you add together the text adventure games created by Scott Adams and Greg Hassett in the 1970s it totals 14 out of the 29 confirmed adventure games made between 1976 and 1979. Eight by Adams, six by Hassett, and they both only started in 1978. Another interesting statistic is Hassett was half of Adams' age having started his first game whilst twelve years old. The arrival of micro computers like the Commodore PET, TRS-80 and Apple II meant you no longer needed to spend many thousands on bulky hardware to quickly start tinkering with code. It really was a time for the bedroom programmer. Scott Adams is commonly referred to in the press regarding the dawn of adventure gaming but despite many similarities Greg Hassett is less known. (read more...)

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It seems I missed an interesting footnote out of my previous exploration of gaming before Adventure's arrival in 1976. Scott Adams has the quite specific accolade of designing the first graphic game on a home computer. It was done in 1975 and on no ordinary computer - a 16 bit system made by his younger brother Richard. There's lots of details on the Exotic Sciences website but I'm more interested in his equally notable career in adventure games. You could say he was the first person to have a career in adventure games as he was the first person to sell them and show the viability of the market. (read more...)

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This is the first of what will be regular updates about the latest games pages that have been uploaded. (read more...)

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Stuga has somehow triggered the tiny, obsessive, over-caffeinated cartographer in my head. I'll wager it's the most disorientating game space in text adventures, with a map that is quite simply a nonsense. It's been understandably described as the third circle of mapping hell and yet that is like holding a red rag to bull, or maybe an OS map. It may take months but I want it mapped. I'm a fan of pencil and paper for these tasks and have scanned some of my earlier attempts and gradual tidying up (see below). Let's start with an example. (read more...)

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Brothers Kimmo and Viggo Eriksson were still kids in 1976, 9 and 11 years old respectively. They lived in Sweden and their parents worked at a technical college and the Stockholm University Computer Centre (QZ). QZ was established in 1968 and was used by several research institutions; it was one of the largest computer centres in Sweden at that time. A friend Olle E Johansson (13 years old) was also linked to QZ because his father was a city consultant with an account to use the mainframe computer. Via their parents they all had access to the PDP-10 computer called Oden and there they encountered William Crowther's game Adventure (spotting a pattern yet?). It was in the summer of 1977 they started working on what would become the first non-english adventure game. (read more...)

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The genre defining Adventure was written by William Crowther while working at Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN) based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It inspired Zorks creation at MIT - also in Cambridge, Massachusetts. So how fitting that the first english adventure game to be created outside the USA was in Cambridge, England. (read more...)

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