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.
This struck so many chords with me! The first game I ever made was a text adventure on AMOS on an Amiga 500! I don't think it's a spoiler for this, but when I wiped the whiteboard the reaction was just what I expected after reading this backstory. Well written, very well done!
Absolutely love that cover art. You nailed it!
Created an IFDB page: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=sq5a1w8mcs3hjtdd
The game could use a description, and some tags :)
Cool, thank you!
Hooray for BASIC on the Atari 800, that’s how I started too! And hooray for a text adventure game you could finish in an hour or two, I have never finished one before, I look forward to giving this a try.
If you're interested in short interactive fiction, the annual Interactive Fiction Competition (IFComp) features mostly short works that can be played in less than 2 hours. Participants are both newcomers and veterans of the form.
The top-ranked games are excellent. Here are last year's winners:
https://ifcomp.org/comp/2024
Save button doesn't work?
Atta boy Scotty! This looks dopaMEAN kid, way to ride the way and whether rising times my m8! w00t!
All the Infocom games were available for the Atari 8-bit computers. There was also a really cool article in Byte about how the data was reduced by bit-mapping.
Caught wind of this on HN. Also had the 800 when I was a kid. I love that you're doing/did this!
xyzzy
Finished the game and it was great. I really enjoyed the story and I made map of how all the rooms are laid out.
The save command says "save failure" when I attempt to save, but it looks like it works. The files are there and I can restore from them.
Yeah, I think that’s a bug in the Vorple engine. I didn’t have the will to dig into it!
Is the .z? file available for download somewhere?
I wonder if the author can see the silly commands I used, like "speak friend" when presented with Tolkien elvish, or "use pants on fish" to try to catch the fish in the room past the removed room, but i guess the player is not wearing pants. There's a "furnance" typo in the room descrip (I tried using "spellcheck furnance" to report it but it didn't understand), and apparently I'm a monster xD I'll come back when I have better time and a bigger paper to jot down my room diagrams =) I also tried using a magic word I remember from an old TI-99/4A text adventure I still remember, "fizbin" that teleports you to a random area of the playable area if you ever got stuck, but alas, perhaps TI and Atari did not get along well =)
I really liked this. It was shared to a MUD-related discord server and I know it had a lot of us sympathizing over the long, long, *long*-running passion projects... congratulations. I quite like the effect near the beginning when you go from one setting to another (I hope that's a vague enough description to not be spoilery). Despite being a pretty antiquated game format, there's still some adherents to text-based mediums - some even using modern-day codebases!
Pending addition to the LaunchBox games database. Thanks for the stroll through our collective childhood.
Can I truly trust someone who would so willfully LIE about the mighty Atari computers?
Pretty sure the only Infocom games to not hit Atari were at the very end (1989) when it did not make monetary sense to continue programming for them.
I stand corrected! In fact I just remembered I eventually had a cracked copy of Starcross for the 800. That said, they may as well have been exclusively for the C64 since it was nigh impossible to find a store in rural West Virginia that stocked software for the Atari 400/800.
*Clapping* Please take a bow.
I truly enjoyed playing your game. It reminded me of the hours I spent with my dad playing all three Zork games, Starcross, Hitchhiker's Guide, etc. on our Commodore 64.
Thank you so much, Scott Andrew! : )
Wow... that was fun, and annoying, and a trip back memory lane. Trying to figure out the commands/phrases that would make the game move forward was the most annoying. Mapping it out and playing it and solving the puzzles was fun, good things on a rainy couple of days.
And it reminded me why some of these puzzles never got done by me, because I'd get too frustrated! *grin* Congrats on reducing your PhD load (Projects Half Done), so don't feel too bad it's finished, it means you can get motivated to do some more!
So....anyone have a few hints for those of us who are stuck? I've mapped out all the rooms I can get into (25 so far), gathered all the things I can (can't get the trout), and I'm stuck as to what to do next. A walkthrough would be nice so I could just look at the next thing I'm missing and then try to figure it out on my own from there, but so would a couple of hints.
Sure there's an item that should definitely help you catch the trout. If it's not in your inventory, you still need to find a few more things to clear the way to where you can find it.
How many keycards have you found? There's a few!
No keycards at all yet! I've got the cartridge, boots, gloves, hot key, and shovel. I feel like I'm missing something obvious (like, I figure the trout is to feed the cat so I can get the key) but I'm not seeing how to get that slippery fishy. And that stupid electrical wire is just mocking me. I want to cut it or pull it out, but I'm not getting anywhere. Maybe just point me in a direction and I'll see if I can figure out what to do next to get me unstuck. Thanks!
Ah, you’re missing a key item. If you’re in the room with the green wire, the item is nearby, but not laying out in the open. Once you find it you’ll have everything you need to deal with the wire. Remember to examine everything!
Nice! Got the key, and the coat. I think it's used to trick the rat, but I feel like I'm missing something as just wearing it doesn't do anything. There is a reason why I loved text adventures and yet found them so very frustrating at the same time. I even created a website to get help with several that I'd been stuck on as a kid - Xenos, Bedlam, and Madness and the Minotaur. I'm going to see if I can figure out what to do with the coat, but I get the feeling that I'm probably stuck again. Sigh.
[ed note: spoiler!]
...And I finished the game. Very cool - I liked it. Thanks for the hint, it got me where I needed to go. And congrats on finishing it after all these years. If you are interested in the Text Adventure games that stymied me as a kid, check out https://www.figmentfly.com. I didn't play Raaka-Tu, Haunted House, or Pyramid but I preserved those sites with the author's permission. I did play Xenos, Bedlam, and Madness and the Minotaur. I finally saw the ends of Xenos and Bedlam with the help of others on the internet, and learned just how hard it was to beat Madness and the Minotaur. I'm not sure anyone did until it was decompiled.