Old Skool Gaming

The other day I watched the video for “It’s Pitch Black” by MC Frontalot which is a tribute to text adventure games. The chorus is, “You are likely to be eaten by a Grue. If this predicament seems particularly cruel, consider whose fault it could be. Not a torch or a match in your inventory.”

This brought back some of the old text adventure games I used to play. I remember Zork, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Leather Goddess of Phobos, and several others I remember but don’t recall the names. I remember sitting for hours every day after school trying to solve the puzzles and typing endless commands like, “pick up book” and “put book in backpack”. It was like reading a book, but one that you could interact with and control the outcome of to a degree.

In some cases, I bought the Infocom hint books. These books contained clues to get you past the more difficult parts of the game, but they allowed you to control how much information and how quickly they gave you hints. Each question was answered first with vague answers and then they got more specific, finally just outright revealing the answer. The innovative part is that you’d use a marker to reveal the answers one at a time as you needed them.

When I was in college, the Internet was more widely available to me, and I discovered multi-player text adventure games like MUDs, MOOs, MUSHes, and others. One particular MUD was responsible for me ducking into the computer labs between classes to kill goblins and shrews. I spent many, many hours building and scripting objects in more than one MOO and even ran my own MOO (LynxMOO) where I met some lifelong friends.

If you Google my name, you’ll find me listed in the credits for enCore, a distance education project using MOOs. If I remember correctly, I scripted an overhead projector object which the professor could load with pre-prepared slides and as she advanced to each one the text would be displayed to all of the students at the same time. The enCore project still exists and they have switched their focus to providing a web-based interface for text-based MOOs.

I suppose you could say text was the basis for my fascination with MMORPGs. I’ve played at least a dozen different MMORPGs over the years and I’m currently active in two. I play Tabula Rasa every day with a great group of friends from my time in Neocron and Neocron 2 (where I was also a volunteer GM for 2.5 years). I also casually play Eve Online. Tabula Rasa is very fast paced and intense so Eve provides a calmer, more social experience when I’m in the mood for that.

Back to text. Surprisingly, text is not dead. You can find plenty of places to play text adventure games online, including the original Infocom games. There is still an active community for MUDs, MOOs, and MUSHes. In particular, I revisited a MUD a co-worker introduced me to almost 5 years ago called Medievia. They just celebrated 17 years of being online and they are still adding features!

They now have a special font which allows them to easier draw ASCII maps of the world and sound triggers that can be configured to play specific .wav files when certain events happen in the game.

I was surprised how quickly everything came back to me. I remembered where things were in the world, how to cast specific spells and when. What dangers to avoid and where to go to level. Strangely enough, it was like picking up a book you haven’t read in a while and finding new details you never noticed before. I think I’ll pop in from time to time to see how things are going and maybe kill a goblin or two.