Microsoft Adventure was the only game included with the initial set of programs announced and published for the IBM PC, making it the first commercial game on this platform. The software, however, will sell in some cases for about twice the price of the equivalent programs sold for use on other competing machines.Ĭopyright ©1980 The New York Times Release They include VisiCalc, a popular business forecasting program three business and accounting packages by Peachtree Software Easywriter, a word-processing package, and even Microsoft Adventure, a fantasy game. machines will be versions of programs that have been popular on other computers. The programs offered initially to run on the I.B.M. Microsoft Adventure is a port of the famous Colossal Cave Adventure, the very first Interactive Fiction game, produced in the '70s. ExtrasĪ hint sheet, solution sheet, complete game map, and score breakdown were all available, but you had to special-order them. On that meeting is discussed the release of the IBM PC and it's software, including VisiCalc and Microsoft Adventure. Software Arts were the development team of VisiCalc, a spreadsheet program for the IBM PC. PBS's TV documentary Triumph of the Nerds features a video recording of a staff meeting of Software Arts, on the day the IBM PC was announced, August 12, 1981. Microsoft Adventure was completely written by Gordon Letwin in 1979, two years prior to the IBM release. This was actually worth advertising as saving and loading games wasn't a common feature back then. You can use your IBM Personal Computer for other things, and yet return days or weeks later and continue your Adventure journey. Since advanced players can survive in Colossal Cave for hours, Adventure allows you to stop the action in the cave. An interesting history lesson, but probably too simple if you're not specifically interested in the topic.īeing such an early game, it's no surprise that even its capability to save/load was advertised as a selling point! Today, the game is mostly interesting for historical reasons because of all the concepts it introduced, and for that matter, an authentic implementation like Microsoft Adventure is better suited.Ī good opportunity for home-computer players to experience the original mainframe Colossal Cave, much like it would have been to play the original one. But then I don't really see why you should be playing Adventure at all. In case you want to have a look at the original Adventure, but would like to have an improved interface and better mechanics than the original mainframe versions, there are a number of colourful clicky-button remakes with graphics and whatnot out there. This might not be the right thing for you if you're not up for the real oldschool. It doesn't leave anything out, and content-wise it doesn't add anything of its own. If you're looking to experience the original game, Microsoft Adventure is a good choice. It adds quite some comfort to the game play, especially if you're used to playing games that are a bit newer than this one. The only distinctive feature is the possibility to save the state to one of two slots on the diskette at any time during the game. The programmer, Gordon Letwin, clearly tried to recreate the original as closely as possible, right down to the crude parser. Microsoft Adventure implements the most popular version of the Colossal Cave Adventure: the one from 1977 with Woods' expansions to Crowther's original material. But soon, it was superseded by much better entries. One of the first games on IBM PC and very first text adventure on PC, when almost nothing else was available yet. 40x25 text mode is used with more common CGA, which is strange, as indeed CGA has 80x25 text mode as well (in the end even early PC-DOS 1.00 booted into that text CGA mode). If you boot the game with MDA emulation, voila, 80x25 is there, which is way better. I found that DOSBox-X can emulate MDA (IBM's Monochrome Display Adapter). From that point of view, text adventure games which just came 1 year later on identical hardware (Zork, Infocom adventures) are much better in that regard.Įdit: so I found that it's possible to have 80x25 text mode in this game. IMO, it was not good decision as there's not lot of text on screen with minimum text decorations, thus reading it is a bit strain on the eyes. The game is using 40x25 text mode even if 80x25 was available on PC. Despite being made in 1981, Microsoft Adventure is not the best, what was possible in those times, from technical perspective. I'm trying to experience old games as they were, taking into account technical limitations of that era.
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