A rather ordinary text adventure written in Commodore BASIC in the early 1980s.
I wrote this game from scratch on a 32K Commodore PET in my Junior High/High School years and ported it to the Commodore 64 (by adding color and slightly-dodgy screen scroll zones, and writing save files to floppy instead of tape) in early 1982. It is heavily influenced by Scott Adams' "Adventureland" and "Pirate's Adventure" and also by contemporary magazine articles on how to write your own text adventures in BASIC (the choice of the variable 'cp' for current position, for one). It contains many tropes that are now somewhat discouraged:
- It's just a treasure hunt
- Mazes
- Magic words for motion across zones
- Little to no logic to placement of items
- Complete lack of a narrative framework
As such, in terms of gameplay, it is unremarkable. It is, however, an example of common games of this kind in the era.
I did find writing and debugging it to be an educational experience that made me appreciate adventure-game-specific languages (ZIL, Inform, TADS, Advsys, et al.) when I discovered each of them. It takes a lot of BASIC code to provide a framework that any of those languages take as a starting point.
At present, only the final Commodore 64 version is available (bugs and typos and all), but there may still be a PET tape or two with earlier versions to be found and digitized.