If you knew me in 1984, you would also know that you could find me glued to a chair in front of our family's Atari 800 personal computer, typing out BASIC programs from issues of COMPUTE! magazine and letting the summer days go by. I was also obsessed with the Infocom series of text adventure games, although I'd have to go to a friend's house to play them because they were almost exclusively for the Commodore 64.
So of course I set out to make my own text adventure game! The Plot of the Phantom was a Zork-alike dungeon crawl with plenty of hide-and-seek puzzle quests for objects required to advance the game (e.g. to open a door, you needed to find the key, which was in the bucket at the bottom of the well, but you needed to find a rope first, etc.). I spent most of the summer working on it, only to be flummoxed when the game completely consumed the 64K (expanded!) of RAM available. A year or so later I got involved in my high school's theatre program and started learning how to play electric guitar, and programming didn't feel that important anymore. So the floppy disks went into a box along with the computer and peripherals and it sat my parent's house until one day it was sold and that was that.
Let's now time-travel to the future a bit. It's 2018, and I've somehow gotten myself a career in software engineering, despite getting D's in maths and a BA in English that took five years to complete. I'm on a leave of absence, and I'm poking around Playfic marveling at the thousands of text adventure games written by hobbyists. This is how I learn about the existence of Inform 7, a modern programming language for creating text adventures ("interactive fiction" in today's parlance) that run on ported versions of the original Infocom software.
So I have an idea.
The The Plot of the Phantom code was gone, but I still had the original notebook of maps and objects. How fun would it be to recreate the game using the same virtual machine that Infocom used to create Zork? Well, not fun enough at the time I guess, because I quickly forgot about it after my leave ended.
But then: COVID. Stuck working from home, protests everywhere, wildfires turing the sky orange, a terrible election year. I needed something to escape, and that's when I pulled out that notebook started tinkering with Inform 7. I hadn't written down everything so it took some time to remember how some of the rooms and puzzles worked. I did some editing, removing some rooms, getting rid of scoring and treasure hunting, and — important! — changing the ending to be a lot less violent (I blame 80s action movies).
As I went about recreating my minature world, the backstory started to become...meta. The original version didn't actually have a story arc, you just had to get from one end of the dungeon to the other. Today the game has some references to the kid I was in 1984, and in some ways is a bit autobiographical. There are some new objects to examine and puzzles to explore, but the new game is largely what it was back then.
And now, it's finished. After forty years, you can now play The Plot of the Phantom in your web browser. It's pretty short, and it's not particularly difficult either, especially if you've played similar games. You can probably finish it in an hour or two.
I'm kind of happysad about it? It feels little bit like putting a ghost to rest.
Anyway, I enjoyed making some retro box art! Look close, there are clues.
