The Plot of the Phantom, a text adventure that took 40 years to finish

Nice job. I think it might be worth adding a few more verb synonyms to make the parser a little bit less strict - what's a few more years of development. :)

Like many other devs I also dipped my feet in the world of interactive fiction. As a kid I was just learning about concepts such as inheritance / OOP / etc. so I went a bit overboard on the ontology.

I remember pretty early on making a rather large mistake in that regard when a friend who was beta-testing the game for me at the time typed in commands like "get key", "get sword", "get ye flask", and then "get Aldwin" to which the game merrily replied "OK" and promptly stuffed an entire human being into the player's inventory.

As a kid, the first text adventure I encountered with "The Cave" a text-choice game created by another student in the same town I lived. Our common teacher had created a "Computer Club" newsletter, to share programs between schools.

Then at a junior college I encountered Adventure, Zork (the full version), Mystery Mansion, and Warp on an HP 3000/terminal mini-computer system.

I began writing text adventures myself, bigger and bigger, and with higher and higher ambitions in terms of complexity, story and world scope, parsing. My "Command English" parser was an incredibly versatile subset of English.

At home I had an IBM Jr (Hey, I loved it!), whose BASIC didn't have GOSUB, so I invented a stack for the parser using strings. (Used strings as a heap in another program to create a very slow 3D vector graphics program.)

In high school I wrote this massive text adventure called Wanderer. I was so proud of it, until the day I went to save it on my floppy disk, at which time it wrote all over the previous version only to abort because it was to big for the disk. No pre-write size check! :(

That was the last one I wrote. But by pushing every text adventure to new levels of capability, over and over, I learned a lot about programming, and developed a habit of innovating in program styles, and domain languages, to match problems.

I wish I had the source for all those programs, but these were the days of many incompatible computers, and storage media that decayed quickly.

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I would love a Mac version of those four text adventures mentioned above. Mystery Mansion seems to have become particularly forgotten.

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"The Plot of the Phantom" makes me so happy! Thank you Scott Andrew!!!

(Completely random, but reading the opening scene, it struck me how perverse it would be to get deeply into the game and find out I was in the text adventure equivalent of "Deliverance"! That would almost be art, lol. Like novels, text adventures are a medium that naturally supports much greater freedom, than visual mediums.)

I was there in the 1980s; writing your own Infocom-style text adventure games was a common project among my peers. There are probably lots of unfinished (or even finished-but-unshared) games out there on old floppy disks in closets.

I have a couple of my own, now archived on my home server.

You could do this too! If you don't feel you have the coding chops for it, read Usbourne's WRITE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE PROGRAMS FOR YOUR MICROCOMPUTER and you'll learn all the secrets of adventure game programmers!

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bxv0SsvibDMTYkFJbUswOHFQclE... [PDF]

Tangentially related, I remember reading about an ancient still being developed adventure game. It was from Eastern Europe (former Yugoslavia, I want to say) about being trapped in a prison that had crazy amounts of depth and consequences. One of them being something like picking up a random unused condom on the floor will result in the pregnancy of another character in a later chapter. I've searched for it again and can't find it, and I couldn't have dreamed it up.

Anyone know the game?

From a serial procrastinator, kudos and best of luck!

Had a quick play and it's fun, quirky, well written. I might just get into this. Damn rat!

This is amazing. Replace “Atari 800” with “TI 99/4a” (and the fact that he eventually finished the game) and you have the story of my early life as a programmer! Well done for shipping. That’s the hardest thing of all to do!

Did George RR Martin write it?

I spent a bit of time using PAWS on an amstrad pcw to pen my own text adventure masterpiece.

It's probably still down there packed up in the cellar ....

Maybe I should dig it out again.

Wow, already stumbled into some good humour. Well done

I'm imagining the application of text adventures specifically designed for second language learning. Quite the possibilities!

"That's not a verb I recognise." (So. Many. Times!)

Sorry, but that isn't a verb recognition problem, it's a comprehension problem. I agree with the downvoted poster that LLM integration would significantly improve the end user experience. However the LLM should not be arbiter of game state (as they suggested), but simply the translator that ensures that the players instructions are understood by the game.

LLMs can enhance text adventures.

I'm not saying having LLMs narrate the entire situation. I'm saying have the LLM sit between gamestate and the player. The LLM is the UI.

Essentially the LLM can see the current game state and possible moves and it's the LLMs job to change the game state and report the current game state to the user (via a well written narrative).

That keeps the world consistent and structured, but the LLM adds enough dynamism to keep it flowing well. You can even make the underlying game state complex as well. Like you can have enemy AI's that actually move through the world too (independent of the LLM).