Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Nostalgiarama
Sometimes I miss Rogue.
In grad school, Karen and I would hang out at my lab on Friday and Saturday nights, playing Rogue for hours. (Waddya mean, get a life? I was in the lab. Working. Heh.) See the @? That’s you, the rogue. The asterisk, that’s gold. Gold is good. The dashes and vertical lines are walls, the periods indicate you’re in a lit room. I tell you all this because there are people Shaina’s age in the room. Shaina, you move the @ with keyboard commands, and you fight the same way.
Yes, this was as good as it got, and it rawked over guess-the-parser games like Adventure or Zork. We could fight Ettins and Kobolds, Imps and Intellect Devourers (watch out, or you’ll get hormed by the Intellect Devourer’s ego whip!) Every letter of the alphabet was a monster, every punctuation mark a scroll, food item, piece of armor, potion . . . And, no, we never found the Amulet of Yendor. That bastard was hard.
For years, whenever I searched for Rogue online, I could only find a latter day version which didn’t quite capture the simple pleasures of the original. But today I found the real thing as well as some of the more “modern” knockoffs, like Angband. Classic Rogue kicks Angband’s ass, of course. After reveling in A Brief History of Rogue (Hawking, eat your heart out), I searched and found Zork and Adventure.
I had just killed the troll in Zork when I dragged Jake over. Look, look, you have to see this. We used to spend HOURS —
But it’s all old news to my son. Not only does he know about text adventure games, he has played the spoofs — and boy, are they funny:
Thy Dungeonman. (Keep trying to take the flask. Don’t take no for an answer.)
Thy Dungeonman II. (Too long for me to play right now, but damn, this one is just as funny.)
Thy Dungeonman III. (Thou art surrounded by . . . thy graphics!)
Now . . . why do I drop fifty bucks a shot for computer games, when there’s great stuff like this on the web?
I’m going back to Zork. Or maybe Dungeonman III — the graphics are truly stunning. You can’t discount the value of top notch graphics.
D.
Oh good lord. I was (and apparently still am) so bad at Rogue.
My best friend in elementary school–her father had THREE computers in his house, one of which had a protoype Space Invaders on it. (He was the director of MIT’s Computer Science lab.) This was in 1976. We went over there all the time.
(And I was bad at it then too.)
Oh, mah Gawd. I remember the insanity that was Zork.
We didn’t have the game, but our cousins did, so whenever we went over to visit, we’d be in front of the computer trying to figure the $#&@#% game out.
Of course, I was just a wee tot back then… 😉
😛 i never heard of rogue, but i did use to love adventure…i found a really good site once this year that had bunches of adventure-like games…i kinda suck at them though…o well.
It is dark in here. You might get eaten by a Grue.
A friend of my folks worked for Digital back in the day – I played many an hour of Adventure on their dumb terminal, let me tell you… I also had an opportunity to play a precursor to Lunar Lander, using a lightpen instead of a trackball to control angle and speed of descent.
Hopefully, the game offerings on the web are only going to get better if other companies follow Microsoft’s lead. For $100/year, a developer can purchase a license that will allow them to develop games for the XBox 360 (for use online at XBox Live). The development tools themselves are free, and can create games for either PCs or XBox.
I was just remembering how ancient Adventure is. I recall playing it from a dumb terminal at my dad’s high school (he taught math), the summer between ninth and tenth grade — 1976, Adventure’s year of inception according to Wikipedia.
In eighth grade, about two years earlier, we toured Cal Tech. The big attraction was a Star Trek game on an enormous mainframe that filled a cavernous room. The graphics were inferior to Rogue, but the idea was basically the same. About twenty of us crowded around a terminal, waiting for our chance to fire off photon torpedos at the Klingons (by typing P, I guess).
As for console games, I remember Pong — oh, doesn’t that go way back? But according to the Pong wiki, something called “Computer Space” predated it by one year (Pong, 1972).
At the risk of appearing a total geek, I actually wrote a text adventure parser/interpreter and a game for it many years ago, called “The Crystal Bridge”. The game was an Adventure style one, but contained characters lifted directly from real life. Two large banks had just “merged” and my (now) ex was project-managing the team that was writing the “bridge” between the two alien computer systems. The game was a spoof Adventure analogue of the highs, lows and personalities involved in the process.
If the internet had existed (all we had was sneakernet) and it had escaped into the wild, I’m sure I’d have been up for libel/slander/whatever!
The parser still exists somewhere in my box of floppy disks for which I no longer have a matching diskette drive.
—–
You are in a small, opulently decorated room full of arguing directors. They are ignoring you. There is no exit that you can see.
There is some responsibility here.
?? Take responsibility
The directors briefly look up from arguing. One looks like he might say something. But alas, they go back to ignoring you. A door has magically appeared to the NORTH, marked “Abandon hope all ye who enter here”
??
LOL! I love that!
Hee. Rogue was a bit early for me, although it might have been right around when I was fooling around on my TRS, writing different versions of Camel and making rudimentary racing games. And you could save it all on a cassette tape!
All the Homestar Runner games are a hoot. You should check out Peasant Quest.
(ETA: the hsr “Strongbad Sings” CD is seriously one of the most brilliant collections of humourous music to come out in the last century. Seriously. Seriously seriously.)
Hi Doug, I sent you some linky love re: Butter Chicken.
And on video games, I didn’t discover them until “Asteroids” got top score once with my m4D SK1L7Z!
(spin and accelerate madly with no real direction, firing blindly, all while shouting “Wheeeeee!”)
DN, my son knows all about Peasant’s Quest. I haven’t checked it out yet.
Beard, thanks. Velvet butter chicken should be shouted to the heavens!
I remember being about five and my folks brought out the huge black and white TV and put it on the kitchen table and hooked up Pong, and this was the big family entertainment for a few weeks. My Mom was pissed about her dining table being used in this manner.
I have played all the Zork games. My only advice: Take the bird. I was one treasure away from winning for AGES! I still think Zork Nemesis is one of the greatest PC games ever made.
Zork Nemesis, eh? I’ll have to look for it 🙂
It’s so old it’s not compatible with most modern windows platforms (need a win95 emulator thing I think, Husband’s domain so I’m not sure). You’ll probably find it in the discount bins as it was released in 1996. If you do get it – and I highly recommend you do, there’s a patch you can download to improve a graphics bug as it was one of those games where they mixed real life actors with computer graphics (like , The 7th Guest, The 11th Hour and Under A Killing Moon). It seems 95’/96′ was a great time for games, especially from Lucasarts – there was Day of The Tentacle, The Dig and Sam and Max. All great games to play with kids. I think you can find them for free to download now-a-days.
Now…tell me the truth: You’ve played Leisure Suit Larry haven’t you?
Your advice regarding the flask was mean.
Yes, but if I hadn’t told you that, you’d have never found out.
(For what it’s worth, my son stuck it to me but good with that flask!)
And of course I’ve played Leisure Suit Larry. Need you ask?
Evidently, I can post you *ahem*copied*ahem* versions of Zork Nemesis. I’ll see if if I can photocopy the book and stuff for you. You know, if you want. Or you could find your own. Either way.
We love our iMac.