GET LAMP - A DOCUMENTARY ABOUT ADVENTURES IN TEXT

With limited sound, simple graphics, and tiny amounts of computing power, the first games on home computers would
hardly raise an eyebrow in the modern era of photorealism and surround sound. In a world of Quake, Half-Life and
Halo, it is expected that a successful game must be loud, fast, and full of blazing life-like action. But in the early
1980s, an entire industry rose over the telling of tales, the solving of intricate puzzles and the art of writing. Like
living books, these games described fantastic worlds to their readers, and then invited them to live within them.
They were called computer adventure games, and they used the most powerful graphics processor in the world:
the human mind. Rising from side projects at universities and engineering companies, adventure games would
describe a place, and then ask what to do next. They presented puzzles, tricks and traps to be overcome. They
were filled with suspense, humor and sadness. And they offered a unique type of joy as players discovered how to
negotiate the obstacles and think their way to victory. These players have carried their memories of these text
adventures to the modern day, and a whole new generation of authors have taken up the torch to present a new
set of places to explore. Get Lamp is a documentary that will tell the story of the creation of these incredible
games, in the words of the people who made them.



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Bo pen nyang.

No, I haven't seen that but it sounds interesting. I know text based adventure games well. Melbourne House who I worked for in the 80s were one of the best known developers of text adventure games such as "The Hobbit" which was well known on a number of computer platforms in the early 80s. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hobbit_(1982_video_game)

Hope you don't mind me jumping in here but at last a topic I can relate to.
I got my first computer in the early 80's (Dragon 32) and that was the introduction to text based adventure games. The games were loaded by cassette tape which could easily take 15mins to load only to end in a Syntax Error and so the load procedure started again. I played Hobbit on a BBC model B computer but never finished the game (I hate you Nigel). I progressed to an Atari 800XL and then an Atari ST before I eventually ended up with a PC many moons ago. I do love the simplicity of the PC (everything is done for you) but how I miss delving into the guts of a computer to get programs to run.


Happy memories
Alan

See what good value you got out of it lol Those darned goblins jumping out and killing you or getting stuck in dungeons.



I remember those old cassette loads. On the C64 ( and it was probably the same for the Dragon 32 ) the game would actually load twice just to verify the second load against the first to make sure there were no loading errors. On the C64 you could actually break in after half the time was up and run the game because it actually was already in memory. That would cut the load time from 15 mins down to just over 7 1/2.



[This message has been edited by Nigel (edited 10-24-2010).]

The Commodore range of computers (Vic16 C64) had dedicated cassette players that I believe were made by Commodore but the Dragon computers relied on standard cassette players for playing music etc. Balancing the output from the player (volume and tone control) was critical and it took me 5 different players and a very friendly electrical shop owner to find a compatible one. Even this was at best hit and miss.

Another thing I remember well was typing in machine code from magazines to get a small program to run. You know what I mean Nigel, 11000110 10100011 11110000 10101010 and so on. Hours or even days of effort and after debugging all you got was a flag waving on screen or a matchstick man walk across the screen which probably lasted about 10 seconds.

Still had loads of fun doing it though.

Alan

Alan, I remember that well. I ended up teaching myself to program in machine code ... it was actually easier than having to type in someone elses programs byte for byte like that. But you are right they were fun times ... that was the very start of home computing. Most people don't realize what it was like back then. But that laid the foundations for what computing is today.



[This message has been edited by Nigel (edited 10-25-2010).]

And even some of the early Yamaha MIDI sequencers like the QX-7 relied on conventional cassete players to load and save data. I remember how fussy they were about input and output levels to get everything to work right.