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The very first computer game I played in 1971 was called Colony. Colony was someone's attempt to turn the secretary problem into a computer game. Except instea
by varelse 5y ago
The very first computer game I played in 1971 was called Colony.
Colony was someone's attempt to turn the secretary problem into a computer game. Except instead of trying to hire one secretary, you were piloting a starship full of colonists and you would visit n planets in order, whereupon you were told how suitable they were for colonization (using Star Trek like planet classes) and you got to decide how many colonists you would beam down to colonize it. At the end, you were rated on your performance.
It is the game that turned me into a hacker. Unfortunately I never got to play it again and I never found its source code nor any reference to this game. And it wasn't until I heard about the secretary problem as an adult that I figured out what the game was really about.
- lakkal 5y agoWhere did you play it, and on what system? There might be people here who would recognize it. Another good place to ask is https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/ https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/
- varelse 5y agoI believe on a PDP-11 at Clarkson college in New York state.
- varelse 5y agoThe other lost game that I played around 1977 on a PDP 11 at General Electric Research Lab is called bloodbath. It was written entirely in Pascal and I have snippets of the source code across multiple files but not the whole thing. We managed to find references to one University professor who recognized the other names but had no clue that a game had ever arisen from it. It was your standard dungeon crawl except that much like this game you could expand it. It's also chock full of in jokes between its authors and I'm not sure I was supposed to be playing it but that was over 40 years ago so I guess the statute of limitations has long since run out.
- lakkal 5y agoThey sound really interesting. Good luck!