Dan meets his childhood hero, Roberta Williams [Colossal Cave]

[Edited to add commentary I didn’t when posting this last night]
Dan from the Game Grumps is one of us who played early text and graphical adventures, so there’s a ton of interest in this video. Perhaps a bit of soul crushing “nobody wants to type into a parser anymore” attitude but Roberta Williams is an absolute delight and obviously shaped the industry based on her experience with Colossal Cave and likely every other text and graphical adventure we’re all familiar with. She’s also hardcore, mentioning combing through Pascal source code to understand why game elements were implemented as they are.

She’s re-made Colossal Cave into a 3D adventure (which I’m sure many will shun as blasphemy) with modern conveniences (but including “hard mode” to get all the points!) and this looks really beautiful and surprisingly faithful to the original with text onscreen, room and item descriptions that are narrated, a limited inventory, and recognizable elements like “Witt’s End”, the Snake/Bird puzzle, and all the magic words.

Zork is name-dropped; Williams correctly states that was post Colossal Cave which she pegs as “the first game” [with a narrative basically], and there’s also good amount of behind the scenes discussion of how they filmed FMV for Phantasmagoria.

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One of the coolest Siarrah-related videos I’ve seen. Another would have to be when LGR combed through an old IBM PC Jr with a load of old Siarrah stuff on.

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