"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.

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:

https://manhole-mania.com/

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.

https://meadhbh.hamrick.rocks/v2/retro_computing/sundog_dot_...