User:Another n00b/Random Encounters
Random Encounters is considered to be one of the first text-adventures of all time, written in 1982 by John Wilson. It was written while he was at University of Minnesota Duluth, for a "project" (i.e while bored). The game was originally ordered to be destroyed by the head of campus, but a copy of it survived. The original diskette it was written on is now in a private collection.
The game was extremely basic, with only about 604 lines of code. Even the true first text-adventure, Castle, was larger than that. But this game was in no-way inspired by castle, so it can be forgiven. The fact that the computer it was written on and for had only 6K of memory may have had something to do with it as well. The game's filename was RANDOM_ENCOUNTERS.TXT.
Summary[edit | edit source]
The game definetly shows it's age, but it was one of the games that inspired zork. The game starts you off with a rusty dagger and three pieces of gold. There is no plot to the game, but it could be a very basic "dungeon-crawler", if that would be the correct term. The game was written in Machine Code.
It was one of two games written for the datapoint 2200. The other was an infinite loop program, which was more of just a piece of interactive humour. John Wilson actually wanted the game to have about 2256 different options, rather than just 660 but the technology at the time restricted it. This would of made it about 3/4 of the size of Zork GUE.