Has anyone succeeded in playing HMS Impetuous on the web emulator linked from the article? When it says “you may need to wait some time”, does it mean upwards of 15 minutes?
It did work for me after about 3 mins. And a lot of weird crackling sounds which, I suppose, may have been the emulated sounds of the disk drive (I’ve never listened to a real TRS-80…).
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Ah, it seems to work in Firefox but not Chrome, at least for me.
I had several TRS-80s. The drives made a lot of noise. I am going to try the emulation.
Thanks
PS. It only works for me in Firefox…
I like it! I wonder if there is a way to make the font green?
What fun!
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“Veronika Megler just wanted a part-time job while she finished her college degree. She didn’t realize it would end with her writing one of the first computer game blockbusters.”
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It’s a classic game that started many of us UK gamers on the text adventure path.
If you’re interested in reading more about The Hobbit, there is an interview with Veronika in issue 1 of http://classicadventurer.co.uk/
Plus issue 8 and 9 explore the “sequels”, Sherlock and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, which were made without Veronika.
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That was a great read. Thanks.
Until now, I had always looked the other way when The Hobbit turned up in one of my game searches. Translating Tolkien to another medium is hard. Peter Jackson with a battery of supercomputers couldn’t do Middle Earth justice. How could a 1982 primitive parser game be anything else than a weak and lazy derivative?
But apparently it was a great creative leap forward by a young woman with strong ideas of how text games should play. Thanks for broadening my view.
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“A young science fiction writer crosses paths with the designer of Zork, sparking a surprisingly experimental game where the player experiences reality from six unique perspectives.”
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1984: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
“When the best-loved makers of text adventures met the best-loved sci-fi satirist of the decade, the result was an unforgettable classic of interactive fiction.”
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In the aftermath of a devastating election, a 1980s game designer starts to wonder if a game could be political.
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Very interesting commentary as usual. Thank you.
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“A writer, mom, and performance artist starts posting a ‘database narrative’ to early online message board The WELL, not sure, at first, if anyone would read it.”
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“Infocom’s last Implementor writes a game in a genre that ‘80s men won’t admit to reading and ‘80s women want to move beyond. Will it suffer a fate worse than death?”
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From the article:
While the dashing Captain Jamison is ostensibly the hero of the story, he’s actually not very effective at pretty much anything,
I laughed.
I was curious about this game from the first time I read about it. Thanks for reminding me. I’ve just given it a more prominent place in my DOSBox game-folder so it will stand out more when I choose my next DOS-game.
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Somehow missed posting last week’s link here:
"In communist Czechoslovakia, a network of teenage hackers discovers that text games swapped on underground cassette tapes are a completely uncensored medium. "
“How thousands of players explored a shared virtual world a quarter of a million rooms big, using nothing but pencils, paper, and postage stamps.”
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“In a virtual world where players could reshape everything about their reality, a vibrant community of makers was born.”
Parser fans may be especially interested in this piece. I was never a MUD person and grew up with all my conventions and assumptions coming from IF… researching this piece I learned so much about this parallel world of multiplayer text games that grew (in some cases) far more complicated than their single-played ancestors.
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Incredible article! Thank you.
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Just as Lambda House itself nowadays, a hauntingly beautiful article. I’ll be thinking about this a long time.
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“The story of the most popular BBS door game ever: Corellian Battleships, fearsome Ferrengi, and a maze of a thousand booby-trapped sectors.”
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“The barely-believable story of the Games Mistresses of St. Bride’s, authors of eight feminist text games who left behind a complicated legacy.”
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