| (MICROSOFT) ADVENTURE (aka. COLASSAL CAVE) |
  Microsoft Adventure has some interesting ties. It's acutally a game made in the 1970's called "Colassal Cave" by Woods & Crowther, which was distributed via the Arpanet and various, realy early, BBSes, and was designed for hobbyist computers like the MITS Altair and IMSAI 8080, though it was ported to pretty much all systems of the 70's and early 80's. What I meant by interesting ties though, is that that is pretty much THAT game - Colassal Cave - but a commercial release through Microsoft. But another interesting piece of history was ADVENTURE for the Atari 2600 was based on this as a graphical representation of the same concept. So seriously, this game had a huge influence oon gaming, and nobody talks about it.In Microsoft Adventure, you assume the role of an "adventurer" who is to go explore a massive cave underneath a stream, and retrieve the treasures within without getting stuck or killed. It's not totally clear what you are....a wizard? A warrior? Are you Captain Caveman? Who knows. The entire game is played via TEXT COMMANDS and the graphics come from your MIND! Basically, this is what we call a "text adventure" - precursor to the graphical adventures that would come later like King's Quest, Mystery House, Maniac Mansion, or Monkey Island. Microsoft Adventure was released as a "booter" - a game you'd stick into your floppy drive, then power on the PC, and it would boot the game up directly, not as a DOS title. It basically required an Intel 8088 CPU, 128K RAM, and came on a 160K Single Sided Diskette in a gray gatefold folder of insane quality for what basically was a floppy disk and a single manual. Compared to those minimum specs, the Tandy was total overkill (especially as I found out later it indeed CAN run an early release of Monkey Island just fine, AND can run Ultima VI, and can run a ton of original AGI games by Sierra quite well). Captain Caveman and The Best Graphics Card in the World - My Experiences It was the summer of 1988 and my sister's used to babysit me, and we would go to their dad's house and of course, since that house was geared more towards a cleaner set of teenaged kids at the youngest, I was often bored. One day I noticed a Tandy 1000 SX sitting on a desk, and asked if they had any games - just one - THIS. This was my first exposure to computer games, and to be completley honest, I did not know whether to be impressed for how detailed this quest was despite not having graphics, or to wonder if computer's were really all that "fun" because iti seemed all the computer could do, to my 8-year old mind, was produce text (oh, how wrong I was). Around that time, I was really into the Flintstones and somehow pictured Captain Caveman as teh Protagonist of this whole adventure story, kind of hilarious since I pictured the wellhouse as being something straight out of the 1980's. I still like to break this one out today, and run it on an even older Tandy 1000A now. I tend to appreciate it more now that I'm older. YouTube Videos |
