1985: Making TEXT ADVENTURE Games | Micro Live | Retro Gaming | BBC Archive

[@crimsontadpoles]

Interesting seeing how much programming has changed since 1985. That part where he's looking at the code, trying to figure out the bug, and thinking it ought to work, is rather relatable.

[@JulianQuinn]

Extremely relatable 😂

[@Lord-Sméagol]

That code is NASTY to read! I can understand why there were so many bugs during development and testing, as evidenced by the bug report shown later! That fat (before-shipping) bug report would DWARFED by the (after-shipping) Microsoft Windows bug reports! I disassembled the CP/M Infocom Interpreter in 1985 and assembled a custom optimized Tatung Einstein version. Then I did something CRAZY - porting the interpreter to BBCBASIC for CP/M so I could analyze and decompile the game data file! Not knowing C back then made my generic decompilation or ZORK1.DAT look a lot like structured BASIC. Looking back on it when I knew C, the decompilation would work better in C-style. There is no need for me to update my decompiler to output C-style source as I have found some Infocom source code on GitHub / historicalsource. A source-level converter may be worth someone writing to convert that ZIL source to C++.

[@arilebon]

This was filmed 1 year prior to Infocom's purchase by Activision; and 6-7 years before Infocom's demise an an entity. Time moves fast in the software industry.

[@MTCason]

The Zork games still rank among the best and most innovative of all time. Wonderful to see this!

[@SpaceCowboy-u7j]

This is the comment I was looking for. ZORK! 🥳

[@SprocketWalker]

This old video footage is a real treasure! Thank you for posting it.

[@ObiWanBillKenobi]

0:21 That is Brian Moriarty who lifts up the can of soda! He went on to be instrumental to Lucasfilm Games/LucasArts! He did a tremendously great presentation at GDC 2015 on how he and his team made "Loom," and that presentation is on KZbin!

[@NorthernerInSpace]

Really enjoyed these games back in the day. Zork was ported to so many platforms, we even figured out how to get it to run on the University mainframe. That reduced our productivity somewhat!

[@ginabattz9716]

My dad got it from his university!!

[@edix1673]

I remember very early text based games from my early childhood, an indiana jones game springing to mind.... are you aware of any emulators for these style games? Id love to have a text based pc games night...!

[@NorthernerInSpace]

@@edix1673 you just need to do a search. Unfortunately if I try and post a link it gets taken down! They are out there.

[@kwc1138]

In early 80s our team stayed late and wrote a complete football manager/simulation program in text only ... being a small mainframe. Later, one work colleague even had his own C64 portable that he brought into office, played staying late in office and then hit the London pubs before getting the last train home.

[@DreamyAbaddon]

@@edix1673 I use DosBox emulator for MSDOS to run these games on a Windows 11 machine.

[@digitaldobbie]

The meeting at the beginning of the video seemed like a bunch of men with an excuse to have a mid-day feast of pastrami and olives

[@Xoferif]

The lady that enthusiastically presents the bug to Dave Lebling is Amy Briggs, who went on to write Plundered Hearts. 😄

[@DasTubemeister]

Back when games came in 4K . Memory, not resolution.

[@skylark.kraken]

Back in my day memory was stored accoustically and if you needed to store more you'd just have a longer wire

[@AlanCanon2222]

174K was the maximum capacity of a Commodore 64 1541 drive, so each game's complete code and database fit in that space. I can't remember how much RAM was used as the interpreter ran (loading room descriptions from the disc at key points), but 4K might not be far off the mark (the Commodore 64 had much more RAM than that, but I'm sure Infocom games ran on far more limited systems with perhaps only 16K total).

[@indetermite]

@@skylark.kraken Wait, I've seen you before somewhere...

[@skylark.kraken]

@@indetermite Maybe the trainspotting video? I have posted quite a few comments across BBC Archive videos but sadly the trainspotting comment is as good as it gets

[@indetermite]

@@skylark.kraken Nah, it was that filibuster on a video about Minecraft's new chat reporting system.

[@panqueque445]

"Why is it not terminating? It really ought to work" I see programming hasn't changed a bit.

[@davecorry7723]

I got my ZX81 at Christmas in 1983. I can't remember exactly when my dad bought me a ZX Spectrum, perhaps 10 months later. And I certainly remember when this clip first aired on BBC in 1985. I taped it. I watched that tape over and over again. I used to love writing adventure games on those machines. Always thought I'd end-up an adventure-game writer. Now I'm 54, and though not an adventure-game writer, I've been a programmer ever since I graduated college. Still love it. When I come home at night, I program. I'm so glad to have been alive in that sliver of time between the rise of the home computer and the rise of Ai. Utterly magical.

[@LeighamShardlow]

My god that moon logic for that puzzle at the end. Who in thier right mind would think to animate something THEN make it yawn as the only solution.

[@TheJonathanExp]

Only a PhD from MIT 😅

[@alexanderfreeman]

I haven't played Spellbreaker, but it's possible the game provides you with enough information to solve it. Sometimes logical puzzles sound illogical when taken out of context.

[@LeighamShardlow]

The problem is that you would really have to point people in that direction. Short of spelling it out, thus defeating the object of it being a puzzle I can't think of how you would push that solution.

[@WhoisTheOtherVindAzz]

Assuming that there are many other otherwise inanimate objects to animate in the game then seeing as this was a rather peculiar object assuming that players would be attempting to animate it doesn't seem that far fetched; even without hints (just assuming that your average player has some imagination; which someone playing a text based adventure at that time hopefully did). Getting it to jawn could be hinted at in multiple ways.

[@AudieHolland]

You're playing a wizard, so of course you try out all the spells you got. I remember other adventures from much less renowned companies, where you had to stand at a certain place at certain time, and perform some random actions, like stand on one foot and some other actions. Also, in some adventures you'd die suddenly because you forgot to do something. Example, in the Dracula adventure, you would arrive at an inn and go to your room to sleep. If you examined the window, you'd find it was open. If you went to sleep with the window opened, monsters would enter your room while you were asleep and you'd die. If you closed the window before going to sleep, you'd suffocate in your sleep(!). The solution: before the monsters enter through the window, you always awaken. Then you have one single action to take to survive the night. Close the window at that moment in time. Not before going to sleep of course. Of course!

[@jaymac7203]

I love this channel so much! Lol the nostalgia from these old fascinating videos is amazing 👏 I wish this was a longer video 😭

[@georgebailey98]

I still have The Lost Treasures Of Infocom compilation on the Amiga, which includes twenty Infocom adventures.

[@3DJapan]

In the early 90s I got a 1982 IBM XT from an auction. I didn't have any software for it until I was walking down the street and found a big box of floppy disks someone left by the curb. They had gotten wet from rain and snow so I dried them and many were damaged but among the working ones was Zork, Hitchhiker's Guides to the Galaxy, and Leisure Suit Larry. I had a ton of fun with those.

[@davecorry7723]

You go south. You are on a street running north-south. You see: a box of floppy discs. The discs are sodden and currently unusable. What do you want to do? >jump forward 30 years and comment about this on KZbin

[@ObiWanBillKenobi]

When playing computer games stopped requiring note-taking on paper, some of the magic was lost forever.

[@alho9231]

I remember Micro Live on the Beeb! Thanks for sharing this 👍👍👍 Infocom were so ahead of their time writing on one system and just porting their games to other computers like running an emulator

[@VirtualVikki]

I remember spending a ton of money for a memory upgrade as you had to have 24k of RAM to run Infocom games and the Atari 800 only came with less than that to start. I had a blast playtesting games for them shortly after this video was shot. It is odd that they have no posters up on the walls. They had a nice poster for Wishbringer at this point. What a blast this video was to watch!

[@videogamebookreviews]

I played a lot of these games at the time. But now that I'm older I don't think I could tolerate the trinity of bad features that came with many of them: Lunar logic (AKA moon logic) Sudden and unavoidable death Soft-locking (AKA unwinnable situations). The third one was not so common - sometimes it was simply the case that you had got lost and didn't know where to go - but a web search nowadays will name guilty games. Still, some good times.

[@rudiklein]

You gotta love the DEC VT100 terminal.

[@3DJapan]

I loved their Hitchihiker's Guide game.

[@jonathancauldwell9822]

For a laugh I had a go at hand-coding a text adventure for the 16K Spectrum and ZX81 last year so I can understand the section about how simple they are to port; essentially just a different set of IO routines. Obviously it's a bit more involved if you're changing the CPU but the core game remains the same

[@HowardChegwyn]

Me. My Spectrum 48k, and a tape recorder from Woolworths. 🔥

[@CABJ007]

Aaahh those were the days!!

[@HowardChegwyn]

@@CABJ007 True story. 🔥

[@CABJ007]

@@HowardChegwyn 👍

[@AtheistOrphan]

‘That’s the wonder of Woolies’

[@HowardChegwyn]

Thanks guys for being polite. You're all awesome. Have an amazing day!

[@c1v1lwar24]

>You are in a room. A wizard sits at a desk reading an arcane parchment. To the north is a mysterious door with a heavy lock. What will you do? >You have selected QUIT.

[@emjackson2289]

Sounds like Lee Carvallos Putting Challenge

[@Asrashas]

Kill Jester

[@c1v1lwar24]

@@Asrashas 😄

[@cryptojonny6837]

>You have selected the CHEAT CODE ROOM please enter pass.

[@thebadgamer1967]

Awesome, love this time capsules

[@AlanCanon2222]

These games were incredibly imaginative and fun to play. I know I spent hundreds of hours playing them on the Commodore 64, Apple ][, and TRS-80. The competitors that used primitive graphics (Sierra Online (Ken and Roberta Williams), Scott Adams) just weren't anywhere near as classy as the pure text games from Infocom. The later ones had more sophisticated parsers that could understand prepositional phrases ("put coin in green slot"), not just VERB NOUN sentences. The illusion of interacting with a live storyteller was strong, in part because of the rich descriptions, and how the programmers seemed to have thought of every off-the-wall thing you might conceivably try. Some games, like Planetfall, contained truly emotionally moving scenes, while almost all of the games had a wry tongue-in-cheek humor to go with the story.

[@davedogge2280]

I worked with a few of the guys in the 90s who were the English equivalent of these guys, they worked for Magnetic Scrolls and did adventure games like The Pawn. To those here in the comments who say, it's nerd talk and boring etc. they're talking about parsers i.e. code that allows a machine to syntactically validate a text based adventure game type language grammar, the code used to run all the apps on the device you use to watch this very same video is checked by a parser and then later compiled into macine code to actually run, parsers can be defined using BNF and EBNF notation. Learn to code !!

[@garryleeks4848]

So borrrrrrrrring

[@davedogge2280]

@@garryleeks4848 That's right. You have to actively engage your brain in order to not be bored.

[@garryleeks4848]

@@davedogge2280 They were probably been paid a fortune to be boring

[@davedogge2280]

@@garryleeks4848 No, I believe bug testers and programmers back in that day only got paid what your average office job paid. It's those who owned the company who got the $ when the company was profitable. Now that's what I call .. boring.

[@garryleeks4848]

@@davedogge2280 very boring mate 👍

[@lorenzozapaton4031]

No syntax highlighting No lsp No autopairs No multicolor theme LISP Absolute madness!

[@ChristianSasso]

Never saw this before, and it is very interesting to see how the original "implementors" used to work: they seem to form a pretty happy bunch.

[@AtheistOrphan]

I hope they remembered to complete their TPS report cover sheets.

[@ginabattz9716]

“Yeaaahhhhhh….”

[@circattle]

Hahaha. I was thinking at the start of the film, their office had some Severance vibes too.

[@springheeledjack81]

Meat platter & softdrink. Perfect

[@Tabletop_Epics]

Infocom was an excellent company which really hit upon one of the best, though too often dismissed, forms of computer gaming. They created novels coupled with physical experiences ("Feelies") which came to life and played with, excited, and challenged the end user. Interactive Fiction, in its traditional form but with the advantages of advancing technology, truly is one of the best things for which one can use a computer.

[@RJ3040]

Wishbringer was written because they wanted to see if they could get away with marketing a rock.

[@randomscandinavian6094]

A great lost artform, the text adventure. Where the graphics are formed in your mind and not in a huge GPU with a cooling system. Watching I figured I must have played at least one of their games and looked them up and it turns out I don’t think I have played a single one, which is a great shame.

[@davidioanhedges]

It's not lost... IF is still alive...

[@AaronAnaya]

A lot of primarily text based RPGs are hugely popular in the indie game scene. The spirit of this stuff is alive in modern games like Citizen Sleeper and Disco Elysium.

[@CoconutPete]

As a kid I always wondered what the Infocom headquarters looked like... these guys were geniuses.. way ahead of their time

[@ResoluteGryphon]

When he said you couldn't reach the cube in the idol's mouth, I immediately thought, "What if you could bring the idol to life and make it yawn?" I hope the rest of the puzzles aren't so obvious!

[@A.Pheno-Menon]

Very interesting archive footage.

[@maineiacial]

Ha! I worked at Alewife Park Place at Infocom during this time. Customer service brat with access to every computer you could think of. Shift ended at 5 wnd i would go play Arcticfox til 11 then take the train home

[@dennis9ustafsson]

Thank you for sharing

[@anthonybradley1555]

the infamous babel fish puzzle, i still get nightmares over that today lol jk🤣but still getting into an unwinnable state really was frustrating 🤬

[@hiker64]

Favorite after Zork was "Nord and Bert couldn't make head or tails of it."

[@cmck1777]

I love this so much

[@michaelbrownlee9497]

There was a star trek game like this I use too play on a Tandy laptop. Back then I had a very developed imagination from reading novels for entertainment. It was pretty cool, because your kind of in a trance when reading. Use too enjoy the radio story shows too. People really freaked right out during the war of the worlds broadcast.

[@AG-ld6rv]

You read a ton and... "your [sic] kind of in a trance" and "Use[sic] too [sic] enjoy." Come on...

[@michaelbrownlee9497]

@@AG-ld6rv the professor has arrived.

[@AG-ld6rv]

@@michaelbrownlee9497 It's just puzzling. It would be like someone saying they used to do mountain biking for a decade straight and then fall off the bike on an easy trail.

[@michaelbrownlee9497]

@@AG-ld6rv let us consider time, as observers and participants Plato's cave.

[@AG-ld6rv]

@@michaelbrownlee9497 I feel a little bad now, because it's coming off like I insulted someone with schizophrenia or something. My bad. It can come with cognitive deficits that people have no choice but to deal with.

[@MicrobyteAlan]

We played these on VAX 11/780s back in the day

[@cosine.]

Bandersnatch vibes 👀

[@hasfidanken]

Who the hell put a thumbs down on this video!?? Must be a grue.

[@maineiacial]

You all should check out Frontalots great 80s nerd song 'Its Pitch Dark'(you are likely to be eaten by a grue)

[@timothystark4475]

Yeah. They wrote ZIL programs on PDP-10 systems.

[@BryonLape]

All gone 4 years later.

[@grueslayer]

Obviously, Zork has been a major influence my entire life... just look at my name. I really do miss Infocom and wish Microsoft who bought Activision after buying Infocom would bring back new text only Zork or Planetfall adventures.

[@AlanCanon2222]

"Play paddleball with Floyd?"

[@emjackson2289]

In the Itchy and Scratchy Text Adventure Game, is there a way to get out of the dungeon without using the Wizard Key?!

[@Braincain007]

Lmao I remember this episode

[@richcollins4208]

Programming is about being extremely detailed at everything and have a 3rd person perspective of what your doing

[@junosix2453]

5:01 Atari ST!

[@AtheistOrphan]

I initially thought that was an Apple Lisa in the thumbnail.

[@Mr.1.i]

Adventure games are easy to make it just needs a bit of good planning but programming the game in what was most probably used is microsoft basic would be an easy task for a person starting to learn programming moving sprites upon background bit maps well thats another level that usually employs cpu assembly which is like putting sums in a calulator in reverse

[@stevena488]

Growing older and having grown up with those "logic puzzles", I've come to realise these games were made by dudes who wanted revenge against their fellow man. Like it's PURE malice. This was their therapy in the 80s

[@gloversasby1898]

I still like text rpgs and wish people would sell them on xbox and playstation to keep the art around.

[@Laura-sg6ss]

Gaminnnngg. Nerds... but also gaminggg💃🏽😏

[@Uhfgood]

I like watching this stuff but nowadays I don't have a large enough attention span to play any of these classics.

[@ltipst2962]

Had to save this to watch later you just know I need to see this

[@xsm5525]

woo!! Amiga got a mention! :)

[@davidpanton3192]

I wonder if they had more customers than staff? Those were the days when the CEO of a tech company wore a tie.

[@maineiacial]

Yes. They had 1000 times

[@AlanCanon2222]

They were really popular, their games sold all over the United States in game stores, computer stores, and mass market retail bookstores. The floppy disks were easily pirated, so the packaging typically had (as stated) little "feelies", physical items that were in some cases essential to solving the game (a star map, say), but cool keepsakes in any case (a glow in the dark magic stone from Wishbringer). They discouraged piracy. Also, the games weren't very expensive, eventually retailing for around $15 apiece. So even if you had pirated a copy of an Infocom game and solved it, it would be fun to buy the packaged game when you had a chance, just because the boxes and their contents were just as imaginative as the games themselves.

[@nicholascampbell3259]

@@AlanCanon2222 I'm not American so I can't speak about the US market, but in the UK, Infocom's adventures *were* expensive compared to other games. That may be partly due to the cost of importing them from the US. I think a typical Infocom adventure for an 8-bit computer like the Commodore 64 cost £25 in the mid-1980s, when most other disk-based games were selling for £15, and even other 'high-end' text adventures from the likes of Level 9 and Magnetic Scrolls cost £20 - and most 8-bit machines in the UK were cassette-based, so owners of these machines couldn't play Infocom adventures anyway. In hindsight, £25 seems really cheap when you look at how much Infocom's games sell for on eBay nowadays!

[@Bertie_Ahern]

When I first invented the computer, I didn't expect it to end up like this!

[@nickc4087]

No one made text adventure games like Infocom.

[@davedogge2280]

Does Zork run at 60 fps ?

[@ahmedshaharyarejaz9886]

With the rise of AI Chat, we are in a new golden age of Text Adventure Games.

[@WreckItRolfe]

I have only played Zork, though I didn't get far.

[@hiker64]

You're supposed to open the mailbox :)

[@eeezeeindian]

Seems like a black mirror episode

[@spearPYN]

Zork is the original computer Dungeons & Dragons. All CRPG games descend from it. The next revolutionary game was Dungeon Master in 1987.

[@maxwellmogadam399]

mmm bandersnatch

[@GraemeCree]

1:04 "The company was started in 1979 by 10 adventure game addicts..." ...Some of whom didn't like games at all, and later killed the company marketing a misguided relational database. Poor Amy Briggs is actually wearing the Cornerstone "Don't Panic" button, which should have read "Panic!"

[@thisisreallyme3130]

While the genre was shrinking, Activision really did mess things up. It makes no sense to allow all these takeovers when you know the parent company doesn't understand what they are buying (if they did, they would have been players in the space).

[@TesterAnimal1]

Old VT100 being used there. Memories… of 24 by 80 character screens and 16k max process memory!

[@TheStevenWhiting]

MetalJesus loves their games.

[@svo913]

Turns out that a bunch of MIT grads weren't the right group to anticipate that the average person actually just wanted pictures so they didn't have to use their imaginations! Thank you, Roberta Williams. :)

[@buzzoff619]

I tried a game like this but was off to such a bad start I quit right away, then I started questioning my own brain. You see, I typed to go east I think. Then after going east I typed go west, and I did. It wasn’t until I was back where I started that I realised west is opposite of east. Basically to me this was an IQ test for babies and I failed.

[@MiataBRG]

I remember text adventure games, they were always incredibly disappointing to a 13/14 Yr old who was excited by the graphics on the box

[@chriswalker3375]

Something not trash from the BBC

[@EmlynBoyle]

I loved playing this games back in the day...when you had to use your imagination (and probably improve your grammar/typing skills!).

[@mr.k3329]

Ahhh but there is one game which survived the test of time and did not succumb to the fate of all those which came before it. A game known as Gemstone IV. The current and longest lasting game of it's kind. Over 40 years in age.

[@ondinnonk]

>snavig grouper

[@CricketEngland]

If they are finding that many bugs in his work then he is obviously not doing his job properly

[@cryptojonny6837]

I don't think its him it's the system many games have glitches and bugs and back in the day technology wasn't the best compared to today.

[@1neinate0]

The guy making the game doesn’t know how to beat the game he made ? Is the machine learning as it goes and making its own game ?

[@jamesbyrne9312]

Isn't it mad that all these whizz kids are now pensioners

[@AtheistOrphan]

NERRRRRDDDSSS!!!

[@emjackson2289]

You are Homer Simpson and I claim my five pounds

[@AtheistOrphan]

@@emjackson2289 - Cheque or Postal Order?

[@grahammcdonald]

I wanna be big.

[@tirmyta]

PLUGH

[@jamesbyrne9312]

Joel berez, Jeff bezoz.lol

[@snxjsnsnjsiwnsjsosjsmmemsjsn]

and here i am in 2024 thinking 'interactive fiction' was a new "word" or concept barely 5 years old...🤦🏻‍♂️🤷🏼‍♀️🙍‍♀️

[@HikikomoriDev]

These games required a lot of imagination from the player... They din't really last long.

[@garryleeks4848]

Haven’t got a clue what they are on about, nerd talk, boring.

[@greyarea6688]

You haven't got a clue what they're on about or they haven't got a clue what they're on about? Sorry, I didn't understand which it was.

[@garryleeks4848]

@@greyarea6688 I haven’t 😂

[@greyarea6688]

Anyone have any idea if these games are either preserved or available to play anywhere online? It doesn't surprise me that in terms of abandonware there a likely large swathes of culturally and historically important titles that have either fallen into obscurity or, sadly, may have vanished altogether.

[@oblongcassidy]

Yep, there are places to play online, and it's even on Steam which is weirdly funny to me

[@octaviussludberry9016]

1:14 Don't do drugs kids.

[@Goettel]

< 3 Infocom