Ovid

Some of you may remember this:

Version 4.16 of Adventure

You are in a forest

Obvious exits:
North, South, East, West

You can also see:
  - Trees

A voice BOOOOMS out:
Welcome to Adventure number: 1 `ADVENTURELAND`.
In this adventure you have to find *TREASURES* and store them away.

To see how well you're doing say: `SCORE`
Remember you can always say `HELP`

Tell me what to do ? climb tree
You are in a top of an oak.
To the East I see a meadow, beyond that a lake.

Obvious exits:
Down

What you probably don't remember is this being written in Perl.

For those of you who are familiar with this, these are the Scott Adams' games from the late 70s, early 80s. Scott Adams games were groundbreaking and largely responsible for many people first getting interested in programming.

I have the driver for this mostly written and hope to push it to github and CPAN soon. My main obstacle in releasing is that I want to include the Scott Adams game databases. I have emailed Scott Adams and asked his permission. Otherwise, I will provide instructions on how to (legally) find them.

There are still some bugs in my code (some games won't load and some crash the driver) and it's mostly a straight port of the C code (which in many ways makes it very ugly). However, it has a stub test suite and with luck you could even use Games::ScottAdams to write your own games.

Having said all that, I'm here in Kiev for YAPC::EU 2013 and in asking around, I've found very few people familiar with these games, much less having an interest in them. In the days of Skyrim, GTA, (hell, even Zork), the Scott Adams games will be ridiculously primitive, but they're a fascinating part of our technological history.

Update: I have the alpha code on github now.