This page has a rather fascinating story of the development of the game Adventure. It was written by Will Crowther (who was at BBN writing the code for some of the first routers on the ARPAnet at the time) and then picked up and embellished by Don Woods. As the story goes, Woods sent a spam mail to crowther@every.computer.on.the.internet to try and find Crowther. Not bad. It worked in those days. (unix geek aside: a “wall” in Unix is short for Write All. Send a message to everyone on the system.)

I don’t know if you’ve played Adventure but if you can get this java applet to load, you can play it in a web browser. It’s pretty authentic, with Courier monospace type and everything. A while ago I wrote about how nuts I was about the game Wizardry. Well, I suppose if I’d been around a computer a little earlier I woulda gone crazy on this game. As it was, Defender and Donkey Kong made it look pretty boring.

Do de dooo. I made my little posterchild app load, write, and parse .ini configuration files today. Now I have state!