Computer Games

There haven't been many computer games that have had me hooked over the years. But the three below dragged me in.

Colossal Cave Adventure

Colossal Cave Adventure, or just Adventure, is a text-based adventure game originally created by William Crowther in 1975 and 1976. It was expanded upon in 1977 by Don Woods.

It is the first well-known example of interactive fiction, as well as the first well-known adventure game, for which it was also the namesake. It was written in FORTRAN for a DEC PDP-10 minicomputer. See Wikipedia: Colossal Cave Adventure.

Sometime in the late 1970s, I obtained a magnetic tape of the source code to Colossal Cave Adventure, and ported it to compile using FORTRAN V to run on a Data General Eclipse S130 16-bit minicomputer using the Data General AOS operating system.

Colossal Cave Adventure intro screen.

Adventure became a hit with the staff in the Oil & Gas division of BHP Head Office who used the two Data General minicomputers we had at the time.

I actually enjoyed studying the source code more than playing Adventure. The code provided me with some interesting insights into the way others were using FORTRAN.

SimCity

Original PC SimCity in 1989.

SimCity was a city-building game designed by Will Wright and published in 1989. See Wikipedia: Sim City.

I came across the game in the lead up to Christmas 1989 while working at Microhelp Computers & Communications. In no time at all the office was highly unproductive with most of the staff hooked on playing SimCity.

Staff were amazed at the massive cities I was able to build. What I didn't tell them was I'd worked out how to patch the game so that I could start with a large fortune of funds!

Doom

I first came across Doom in 1993 while working at the Australian Surveying and Land Information Group. Doom is considered one of the first pioneering first-person shooter games, introducing IBM-compatible computers to features such as 3D graphics. See Wikipedia: Doom (franchise).

Original Doom in 1993.

I'm pretty sure it was running on Microsoft Window 3.1, and I became hooked for a while.