18 ms·

Ken and Roberta Williams Working on Colossal Cave Adventure Remake for VR and PC

248 points by peterkelly 5y ago

drewg123 5y ago
I first played Colossal Cave adventure on a terminal in my mom's office in the late 70s. She was a FORTRAN programmer for a defense contractor, and would take me into the office on school holidays when she could not find daycare. She'd plunk me down in front of the terminal, and I'd play text based games all day. I think this is what got me into computers and is basically responsible for me choosing my major and later my career..
- AyyWS 5y ago
  In the late 80s, I was in a middle school Unix class. My friends and I spent most of the time playing MUDs over telnet. They're all in tech jobs today.
  - mmcgaha 5y ago
    That sounds amazing! Where was your middle school?
    - AyyWS 5y ago
      Kansas, USA. The class was put on by Washburn University.
  - munk-a 5y ago
    See - that's what I'm waiting to come to VR, the MUDs. I want to strap on my VR helmet and be in a dark bedroom with only the glow of the CRT for light at 3 AM in the morning MUDing with someone on the otherside of the world who I'd been trying to set up a scene with for weeks for IC reasons.
    - boogies 5y ago
      MUD = Multi-User Dungeon IC = ?
      - munk-a 5y ago
        MUD is a general term for text-based roleplaying game - Multi-User Dungeon has always struck me as an unhelpful definition since it applies a lot more focus on mechanical components than most MUDs actually have. IC is in character. I can explain this better with an example I believe. While playing as a jeweler in Minas Tirith in a MUD I had need to consult with an armorer PC to receive some in-character training on basic armorsmithing as Gondor was, at that point in the plot, in desperate need of arms and armor quickly so all of the PCs who had any sort of forge capable of metalwork were trying to make an effort of supporting the war effort. While there were lots of weaponsmiths in EST the one armorer I knew well and enjoyed playing with happened to be a Chinese player who occasionally overlapped with EST. I ended up staying up late one Saturday night and having a very fun scene with them, but there were serious logistical complications and a bunch of DMs sent back and forth to make sure we were both available.
- johnny53169 5y ago
  It's very interesting, did you and your mom ever talk about your respective programming career? How was it like when she was a programmer?
  - drewg123 5y ago
    Sadly, she was a heavy smoker, and passed away from lung cancer when I was still very early in my career. The one time we "worked together" was when I got a summer internship at another defense contractor, programming in FORTRAN 77 on VAX/VMS. Coming from C & UNIX at the university, VMS and FORTRAN was quite different. She taught me the basics of the language over a weekend. I never really adjusted to the column layout stuff. I recall we would use used punch cards for scrap paper when I was a kid. Pretty much every note or list she wrote was on a used punch card.
- pugworthy 5y ago
  1976 I was part of a US National Science Foundation project for high school students. Someone had a teletype on 300 baud modem in the house we stayed at, and played it there. Good times, and also highly formative.
- Jaruzel 5y ago
  You can re-live your childhood online: https://grack.com/demos/adventure/ https://grack.com/demos/adventure/ It's the 1984 variant version[1] but close enough. It's also retro styled as well! --- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_Cave_Adventure#Later_versions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_Cave_Adventure#Later_...
  - mmastrac 5y ago
    That's my project! :) Glad someone posted it. The source is available here: https://github.com/mmastrac/adventure https://github.com/mmastrac/adventure
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- sgustard 5y ago
  Same here, my mom worked at the local community college. The other detail was the computer had no display, only a line printer. Spewed out quite a stack of paper by the end of a day playing Adventure.
gotaquestion 5y ago
Excited to see how this pans out. Myst and Riven (and to an extent, "7th Guest" and Gadget) 3D-ified text adventures and were very successful. Riven III was node based but provided full 360 degree viewing, but the game sucked. With the Williams' at the helm I don't think they'll let a substandard game through. Although I'm curious to see if they can add any more depth to it than Robyn and Rand Miller could squeeze out of the engine. IMHO I don't think there has been a single novel advancement to 3D games in decades, as I don't consider goggles to be novel. I had already played all the Infocom games before discovering Crowther and Woods' Adventure (remember this was pre-internet). It came in the box with a Mockingboard speech synthesizer I got for my Apple in the early 80's. The novelty was that the mocking board text-to-speeched the game, which was neat but unbearable. Not to mention it didn't know how to say "xyzzy" correctly.
- moron4hire 5y ago
  Have you played the 3D Myst remake? I've played it both on pancake monitor and in the Quest. On PC, I found it was very easy, though that might have been because I was 20 years older than the first time I played it. It's a delightful experience in the Quest. Some of the difficulty comes back due to not having any ability to take notes. But being able to walk around and see this world "for real" that I've already spent so much time in was giddying.
  - gotaquestion 5y ago
    I remember reading something about it back when it came out (RealMyst I think?) but didn't get into it. I think a non-node based Myst would be difficult since there would be so many places to look for clues. In node-based Myst, you were forced to scrutinize a very small field of view. Myst III solved the 360-degree FOV by having the clues be quite obvious, as it is harder to "hide a lever" if the user can look anywhere. I was excited for Return to Zork's attempt at rendering, but was that ever a bummer ("Want some rye?" ...wtf?), as was Inquisitor.
    - moron4hire 5y ago
      Yes, RealMyst, name escaped me for a moment. Like I said, I found RealMyst easier than original Myst. Being able to move in 3D space made levers more obvious, not hidden in background detail. I also tended to get lost in original Myst and had difficulty getting back and forth between puzzles while backtracking (especially a problem in Riven). RealMyst with free movement taps into my spatial awareness much better.
xioxox 5y ago
I'll be interested in this remake when it's done. I don't know what it is about Colossal Cave, but the descriptions of the caves were pure magic to me when I played this many years ago. Perhaps it comes from the real experience caving of the authors. I also loved the Magnetic Scrolls games from the end of the 80s, like Jinxter - they had some great humour (but difficult puzzles).
GLGirty 5y ago
What, with your bare hands?!
- omarhaneef 5y ago
  > use computer You don't know how > pick manual You have the manual > read manual You now know how to use a computer > use computer Your hands are busy > drop manual > use computer ... except funnier
  - dylan604 5y ago
    > I know Kung Fu Show me
  - spywaregorilla 5y ago
    Things like this do happen to an extent in VR games, which is funny. A classic example would be opening a locked door to which you have a key in, say, a zelda game. On a controller you just go over to it and press A. In VR you may need to sheathe your sword to draw the key and put away your shield to steady the door knob to unlock it and then push open the door and then pick up your weapons again. The whole "Pick up your weapons again" loop at the end of little interactions is common in many games and is more involved than in traditional games that would abstract it.
- zestyping 5y ago
  What a concept! ;)
jmyeet 5y ago
Is it just me or is there a wider belief that VR will never be anything more than a niche? Facebook aka Meta has bet its future on this and I think it's a mistake. When people think of VR they think of the Matrix but that will never be because of the laws of physics. Latency is the big problem (unless such a network is very localized in the real world) but visually speaking, black is a problem. Black is a colour on computer displays but in the real world it's the absence of light. Another big visual problem: focus. Yet another problem: controls. In the real world you just think and act. In VR you have these controls to direct movement. That's never going to feel natural so you're pretty much predicated on a pure brain-computer interface for it to feel realistic. There's no killer app for VR (optimists will add "yet") and no hint of what one might be. Part of what made these old adventure games so compelling (IMHO) was the format: text. Games like Myst added images and can have an appeal all of their own but it's different to the text adventure game. The same goes for video (meaning rendered 3D graphics). I have doubts that this magic (which has a heavy dose of nostalgia) will translate to VR. For me the Infocom games (Zork in particular) will always be remembered fondly but part of the magic was the time and you can never step in the same river twice.
- delecti 5y ago
  How much VR have you tried? After just 10 minutes of Beat Saber I was left with an odd feeling after taking off the headset. I think your standards for VR are unreasonably high, considering how utterly addicting it's likely to be to huge numbers of people if it just gets fairly engaging. Put another way, both Roblox and Minecraft look like crap, and are largely graphics we could have replicated on the the Playstation 1 or N64, but Microsoft bought Minecraft for $2.5 billion, and Roblox has a valuation in the tens of billions. The threshold between "there's no killer app" and "yet" is razor thin.
  - jmyeet 5y ago
    I've tried an Oculus Go for maybe 12 hours? Some of it was interesting but it always felt gimmicky to me. A bit like 3D in movie theaters. Like it was all so... forced.
VonGuard 5y ago
Want to hear Roberta talk about her experience playing Adventure for the first time? We interviewed her in our podcast about this very topic: https://art19.com/shows/the-madecast/episodes/a9172691-a4fb-464c-a812-5a7c23bdcae2 https://art19.com/shows/the-madecast/episodes/a9172691-a4fb-...
smoyer 5y ago
If you're interested I'm the original Infocom text adventures, the "Eaten by a Grue" podcast does an analysis of one game peer episode. The first half of each episode is spoiler-free so you can enjoy the content before you've played through. https://monsterfeet.com/grue/ https://monsterfeet.com/grue/
jandrusk 5y ago
I just don't see VR going mainstream for gaming. I think there is a certain degree of tactile feedback that gamers look for when gaming that they get from a controller or a keyboard and mouse. It will reach a niche audience and I think that most likely be millennials. It will never work for greybeards like me with Vertigo ;)
- stevenwoo 5y ago
  I get uncomfortably sweaty after 10 minutes, but maybe that depends on fit.
  - kemayo 5y ago
    It makes a fair difference if you add a fan into your headset: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2021/08/a-fan-for-the-valve-index-consider-it-an-essential-upgrade-purchase/ https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2021/08/a-fan-for-the-valve-in...
- jedberg 5y ago
  Have you tried an Oculus? I have vertigo too and am a graybeard and it doesn't bother me at all. They did a good job with the refresh rate. Other VR headsets do still bother me, so they did something right (at least for me) on the Oculus.
bebop 5y ago
Off topic, but I was just watching an interview with those two about some of the games that they developed at Sierra: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAemLilaNjk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAemLilaNjk
spywaregorilla 5y ago
I think VR and text adventurers are at an odd crossroads. Text adventures are noteworthy for what they let you do with an unlimited interface. But it's also noteworthy in what you CANNOT do. In VR there's a lot of things you can't explicitly forbid trying to do, namely anything that's somewhat physical in your nearby space.
ethbr0 5y ago
Because this is approaching the web horizon, for those who don't know, Ken and Roberta Williams are pretty close to the SoCal version of Shigeru Miyamoto. They founded Sierra On-Line in 1979, which published pretty stellar titles until its sale in 1996 (and subsequent mismanagement and outright corporate fraud by the acquirer). Here are a list of the things they published, among which some were developed inhouse, among which some were developed by one or both of the Williams. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Sierra_Entertainment_video_games https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Sierra_Entertainment... PS: And on a personal note, I can't imagine my teenage years without Sierra. From King's Quest to Dynamix to Valve's Half-Life to Relic's Homeworld to Gearbox's initial Half-Life console ports, they survived far longer in an industry where so many don't... while putting out amazing stuff over decades. Or to put it another way, when they first started writing and publishing games, there was no Internet (in the modern sense) and Intel had just released the 10 MHz 8086 built on a 3000 nm (3 µm) node. By the time they left the company, the web and JavaScript existed, and Intel had just released the Klamath 300 MHz Pentium II on a 350 nm node. Crazy times.
- slowmovintarget 5y ago
  Hacking King's Quest on my middle school's Apple IIe was one of the ways I learned to code.
- tomc1985 5y ago
  Did they really have much of a role to play for Half-Life or Homeworld? By that point they were just a publisher.
  - ethbr0 5y ago
    Supposedly they chose to publish Half-Life because they regretted turning down the chance to buy id, and thought Valve seemed like a good company. So I think they deserve some credit for recognizing talent.
- VBprogrammer 5y ago
  They also had a couple of really cool Nordhavn motor yachts which Ken has blogged about extensively, including crossing the Atlantic in their first one.
lolive 5y ago
I really hope we will die a lot in this game... Like in the good old times [1] [1]: https://youtu.be/KLPXP5KkcMQ https://youtu.be/KLPXP5KkcMQ
mancerayder 5y ago
I grew up on those Sierra adventure games -- LucasArts too! Would love to see these (and the Williams) come back in any form.
denton-scratch 5y ago
> interesting characters I played ADVENT for many hours, back in the day (on the boss's time). The only characters I remember are a dwarf, a pirate, a dragon, a bird, a giant, and a giant clam. OK, I suppose the bear and the troll might count as characters. None of these count as "interesting characters" - a chap that always says "Fee Fi Fo Foo" isn't particularly interesting, and none of the others has any dialogue.
LichenStone 5y ago
I really hope they make use of the Steam Audio API in the game, which can simulate sound reflections, occlusion, reverb, and HRTF directional positioning to the listener for sound sources. Would make a ton of sense for a cave environment.
hnthrowaway0315 5y ago
I'm actually thinking it makes a lot of sense to convert those dungeon crawlers (Dungeon Master for example) to VR. I'm wondering how much work is needed. One definitely needs to remodel the whole world and create new models for the monsters and items so it's essentially making a whole new game, plus a lot of gameplay code needs to be "converted" to VR. And how does one limit the actions of players in VR?
ndand 5y ago
"Roberta and I will be on Twitch tomorrow to talk about a new game we're working on. Our interview will be at 3pm Pacific time." https://twitter.com/caboken/status/1506390567197896705 https://twitter.com/caboken/status/1506390567197896705
spcebar 5y ago
For some background, Colossal Cave Adventure is arguably the first narrative computer game, and probably the first text adventure. It was developed in the 70s by Will Crowther (who helped create ARPANET) and Don Woods, who added most the game's puzzles. It's a very oldschool fantasy text adventure which, by today's standards, requires a lot of patience, but it created a genre and inspired games like Zork (and by extension Infocom), and Adventure for the 2600, which itself inspired many other games. Rick Adams has a great website dedicated to it with a lot of history and fun facts (https://rickadams.org/adventure/ https://rickadams.org/adventure/), and you can play the game directly on the site. Very exciting to see the Sierra crew taking this on. It seems like a bizarre thing to adapt but I'm a big fan of them and the original.
- mintplant 5y ago
  I discovered ADVENT because it was bundled in with DSLinux [0], the Linux distribution for the Nintendo DS. Poking through /bin, I thought it was going to be a little CLI advent calendar---imagine my surprise when the console started telling me a story! There was a long period in grade school where I was kinda obsessed with the game and its derivatives, especially Mike Arnautov's 770-point expansion [1]. I remember pulling apart his A-code sources (a custom DSL for implementing his versions of the game) to make my own additions to the world. From there I discovered the Inform 7 authoring system [2] and the wider text adventure/interactive fiction ecosystem. I came into the whole thing comparatively late (sometime in the late 2000s, I guess?), but Colossal Cave is still a huge part of my childhood. Expansions, ports, remixes, and re-imaginings are already a tradition for the game: even the version most people are familiar with is Don Woods's expansion of Will Crowther's original code. I'm psyched to see the Williams's contribution to the canon! [0] https://dslinux.org/ https://dslinux.org/ [1] https://mipmip.org/downloads.html https://mipmip.org/downloads.html [2] http://inform7.com/ http://inform7.com/
  - anthk 5y ago
    Inform6 it's better if you like easy OOP and structured code. Get Inform Begginers Guide and Inform's Designers Manual. Both are free PDF files. You'll need Inform6 and the Inform 6 library (easy).
mrfusion 5y ago
Is there anywhere to play the original colossal cave adventure?
- anthk 5y ago
  Linux: install bsdgames, type down "advent". All: Get a Z-Machine interpreter (Frotz/Winfrotz/Lectrote) and "advent.z5" from here: https://ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/Advent.z5 https://ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/Advent.z5
- jamesjamesm 5y ago
  Here https://archive.org/details/msdos_Classic_Adventure_-_The_Original_Colossal_Cave_1996 https://archive.org/details/msdos_Classic_Adventure_-_The_Or...
dang 5y ago
Related: Roberta Williams, the Queen of Graphic Adventure Video Games - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30781307 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30781307 - March 2022 (no comments yet)
christkv 5y ago
I've started playing Kings quest 2 with the kids and oh my the amount of deaths. I had forgotten the pixel perfect walking needed not to plunge to your death. Kids are enjoying it though since they get all the fairy tale references.
auselen 5y ago
Ken’s book “Not All Fairy Tales Have Happy Endings” was a nice read: https://kensbook.com/faq/ https://kensbook.com/faq/
- 20wenty 5y ago
  Audible version is great, too. https://www.audible.com/pd/Not-All-Fairy-Tales-Have-Happy-Endings-Audiobook/B08R6M34H9 https://www.audible.com/pd/Not-All-Fairy-Tales-Have-Happy-En...
- selimthegrim 5y ago
  I am really hoping for some Mixed-Up Mother Goose dirt (the first game I ever played on the Apple II in 1992)
egypturnash 5y ago
Initial promotional footage is... not very impressive. https://twitter.com/colossalcave3d/status/1506377702806196224 https://twitter.com/colossalcave3d/status/150637770280619622...
uxcolumbo 5y ago
I wish Ken & Roberta would work on a new 2D pixel art point&click game. Doing VR well takes a lot of effort, which would be better spent on story and creating beautiful pixel art - which somehow has a richness that VR can't seem to replicate (yet).
dekhn 5y ago
Dark Crystal (from their company) ruined adventure games for me. Later I found a cheat book and turns out you had to type a totally non-obvious command (LISTEN STREAM) in a specific location to unlock the rest of the game. No fun.
- mehlmao 5y ago
  The Old Man Murray piece "Death of Adventure Games" sums up my feelings on the genre. >Who killed Adventure Games? I think it should be pretty clear at this point that Adventure Games committed suicide. https://oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html https://oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html
- aaron695 5y ago
magpi3 5y ago
I would like to see this happen for other games like the old Inform game Trinity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_(video_game)
- gotaquestion 5y ago
  I'm literally playing Trinity on an emulator right now. Not sure how I missed it back in the 80's but I'm really enjoying it. I'm stuck on the satellite door. Don't spoil it! Playing text adventures requires far more willpower today since the answers are easily accessible via the Internet. Not giving in to cheating really makes it feel old-school.
psyc 5y ago
Slash and Axl reunited. Ken and Roberta Williams making a game. What's next? _why reappears on TikTok?

248 points by peterkelly 5y ago

I first played Colossal Cave adventure on a terminal in my mom's office in the late 70s. She was a FORTRAN programmer for a defense contractor, and would take me into the office on school holidays when she could not find daycare. She'd plunk me down in front of the terminal, and I'd play text based games all day. I think this is what got me into computers and is basically responsible for me choosing my major and later my career..

AyyWS 5y ago
In the late 80s, I was in a middle school Unix class. My friends and I spent most of the time playing MUDs over telnet. They're all in tech jobs today.
- mmcgaha 5y ago
  That sounds amazing! Where was your middle school?
  - AyyWS 5y ago
    Kansas, USA. The class was put on by Washburn University.
- munk-a 5y ago
  See - that's what I'm waiting to come to VR, the MUDs. I want to strap on my VR helmet and be in a dark bedroom with only the glow of the CRT for light at 3 AM in the morning MUDing with someone on the otherside of the world who I'd been trying to set up a scene with for weeks for IC reasons.
  - boogies 5y ago
    MUD = Multi-User Dungeon IC = ?
    - munk-a 5y ago
      MUD is a general term for text-based roleplaying game - Multi-User Dungeon has always struck me as an unhelpful definition since it applies a lot more focus on mechanical components than most MUDs actually have. IC is in character. I can explain this better with an example I believe. While playing as a jeweler in Minas Tirith in a MUD I had need to consult with an armorer PC to receive some in-character training on basic armorsmithing as Gondor was, at that point in the plot, in desperate need of arms and armor quickly so all of the PCs who had any sort of forge capable of metalwork were trying to make an effort of supporting the war effort. While there were lots of weaponsmiths in EST the one armorer I knew well and enjoyed playing with happened to be a Chinese player who occasionally overlapped with EST. I ended up staying up late one Saturday night and having a very fun scene with them, but there were serious logistical complications and a bunch of DMs sent back and forth to make sure we were both available.
johnny53169 5y ago
It's very interesting, did you and your mom ever talk about your respective programming career? How was it like when she was a programmer?
- drewg123 5y ago
  Sadly, she was a heavy smoker, and passed away from lung cancer when I was still very early in my career. The one time we "worked together" was when I got a summer internship at another defense contractor, programming in FORTRAN 77 on VAX/VMS. Coming from C & UNIX at the university, VMS and FORTRAN was quite different. She taught me the basics of the language over a weekend. I never really adjusted to the column layout stuff. I recall we would use used punch cards for scrap paper when I was a kid. Pretty much every note or list she wrote was on a used punch card.
pugworthy 5y ago
1976 I was part of a US National Science Foundation project for high school students. Someone had a teletype on 300 baud modem in the house we stayed at, and played it there. Good times, and also highly formative.
Jaruzel 5y ago
You can re-live your childhood online: https://grack.com/demos/adventure/ https://grack.com/demos/adventure/ It's the 1984 variant version[1] but close enough. It's also retro styled as well! --- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_Cave_Adventure#Later_versions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_Cave_Adventure#Later_...
- mmastrac 5y ago
  That's my project! :) Glad someone posted it. The source is available here: https://github.com/mmastrac/adventure https://github.com/mmastrac/adventure
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
sgustard 5y ago
Same here, my mom worked at the local community college. The other detail was the computer had no display, only a line printer. Spewed out quite a stack of paper by the end of a day playing Adventure.

gotaquestion 5y ago

Excited to see how this pans out. Myst and Riven (and to an extent, "7th Guest" and Gadget) 3D-ified text adventures and were very successful. Riven III was node based but provided full 360 degree viewing, but the game sucked. With the Williams' at the helm I don't think they'll let a substandard game through. Although I'm curious to see if they can add any more depth to it than Robyn and Rand Miller could squeeze out of the engine. IMHO I don't think there has been a single novel advancement to 3D games in decades, as I don't consider goggles to be novel. I had already played all the Infocom games before discovering Crowther and Woods' Adventure (remember this was pre-internet). It came in the box with a Mockingboard speech synthesizer I got for my Apple in the early 80's. The novelty was that the mocking board text-to-speeched the game, which was neat but unbearable. Not to mention it didn't know how to say "xyzzy" correctly.

moron4hire 5y ago
Have you played the 3D Myst remake? I've played it both on pancake monitor and in the Quest. On PC, I found it was very easy, though that might have been because I was 20 years older than the first time I played it. It's a delightful experience in the Quest. Some of the difficulty comes back due to not having any ability to take notes. But being able to walk around and see this world "for real" that I've already spent so much time in was giddying.
- gotaquestion 5y ago
  I remember reading something about it back when it came out (RealMyst I think?) but didn't get into it. I think a non-node based Myst would be difficult since there would be so many places to look for clues. In node-based Myst, you were forced to scrutinize a very small field of view. Myst III solved the 360-degree FOV by having the clues be quite obvious, as it is harder to "hide a lever" if the user can look anywhere. I was excited for Return to Zork's attempt at rendering, but was that ever a bummer ("Want some rye?" ...wtf?), as was Inquisitor.
  - moron4hire 5y ago
    Yes, RealMyst, name escaped me for a moment. Like I said, I found RealMyst easier than original Myst. Being able to move in 3D space made levers more obvious, not hidden in background detail. I also tended to get lost in original Myst and had difficulty getting back and forth between puzzles while backtracking (especially a problem in Riven). RealMyst with free movement taps into my spatial awareness much better.

xioxox 5y ago

I'll be interested in this remake when it's done. I don't know what it is about Colossal Cave, but the descriptions of the caves were pure magic to me when I played this many years ago. Perhaps it comes from the real experience caving of the authors. I also loved the Magnetic Scrolls games from the end of the 80s, like Jinxter - they had some great humour (but difficult puzzles).

GLGirty 5y ago

What, with your bare hands?!

omarhaneef 5y ago
> use computer You don't know how > pick manual You have the manual > read manual You now know how to use a computer > use computer Your hands are busy > drop manual > use computer ... except funnier
- dylan604 5y ago
  > I know Kung Fu Show me
- spywaregorilla 5y ago
  Things like this do happen to an extent in VR games, which is funny. A classic example would be opening a locked door to which you have a key in, say, a zelda game. On a controller you just go over to it and press A. In VR you may need to sheathe your sword to draw the key and put away your shield to steady the door knob to unlock it and then push open the door and then pick up your weapons again. The whole "Pick up your weapons again" loop at the end of little interactions is common in many games and is more involved than in traditional games that would abstract it.
zestyping 5y ago
What a concept! ;)

jmyeet 5y ago

Is it just me or is there a wider belief that VR will never be anything more than a niche? Facebook aka Meta has bet its future on this and I think it's a mistake. When people think of VR they think of the Matrix but that will never be because of the laws of physics. Latency is the big problem (unless such a network is very localized in the real world) but visually speaking, black is a problem. Black is a colour on computer displays but in the real world it's the absence of light. Another big visual problem: focus. Yet another problem: controls. In the real world you just think and act. In VR you have these controls to direct movement. That's never going to feel natural so you're pretty much predicated on a pure brain-computer interface for it to feel realistic. There's no killer app for VR (optimists will add "yet") and no hint of what one might be. Part of what made these old adventure games so compelling (IMHO) was the format: text. Games like Myst added images and can have an appeal all of their own but it's different to the text adventure game. The same goes for video (meaning rendered 3D graphics). I have doubts that this magic (which has a heavy dose of nostalgia) will translate to VR. For me the Infocom games (Zork in particular) will always be remembered fondly but part of the magic was the time and you can never step in the same river twice.

delecti 5y ago
How much VR have you tried? After just 10 minutes of Beat Saber I was left with an odd feeling after taking off the headset. I think your standards for VR are unreasonably high, considering how utterly addicting it's likely to be to huge numbers of people if it just gets fairly engaging. Put another way, both Roblox and Minecraft look like crap, and are largely graphics we could have replicated on the the Playstation 1 or N64, but Microsoft bought Minecraft for $2.5 billion, and Roblox has a valuation in the tens of billions. The threshold between "there's no killer app" and "yet" is razor thin.
- jmyeet 5y ago
  I've tried an Oculus Go for maybe 12 hours? Some of it was interesting but it always felt gimmicky to me. A bit like 3D in movie theaters. Like it was all so... forced.

VonGuard 5y ago

Want to hear Roberta talk about her experience playing Adventure for the first time? We interviewed her in our podcast about this very topic: https://art19.com/shows/the-madecast/episodes/a9172691-a4fb-464c-a812-5a7c23bdcae2 https://art19.com/shows/the-madecast/episodes/a9172691-a4fb-...

smoyer 5y ago

If you're interested I'm the original Infocom text adventures, the "Eaten by a Grue" podcast does an analysis of one game peer episode. The first half of each episode is spoiler-free so you can enjoy the content before you've played through. https://monsterfeet.com/grue/ https://monsterfeet.com/grue/

jandrusk 5y ago

I just don't see VR going mainstream for gaming. I think there is a certain degree of tactile feedback that gamers look for when gaming that they get from a controller or a keyboard and mouse. It will reach a niche audience and I think that most likely be millennials. It will never work for greybeards like me with Vertigo ;)

stevenwoo 5y ago
I get uncomfortably sweaty after 10 minutes, but maybe that depends on fit.
- kemayo 5y ago
  It makes a fair difference if you add a fan into your headset: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2021/08/a-fan-for-the-valve-index-consider-it-an-essential-upgrade-purchase/ https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2021/08/a-fan-for-the-valve-in...
jedberg 5y ago
Have you tried an Oculus? I have vertigo too and am a graybeard and it doesn't bother me at all. They did a good job with the refresh rate. Other VR headsets do still bother me, so they did something right (at least for me) on the Oculus.

bebop 5y ago

Off topic, but I was just watching an interview with those two about some of the games that they developed at Sierra: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAemLilaNjk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAemLilaNjk

spywaregorilla 5y ago

I think VR and text adventurers are at an odd crossroads. Text adventures are noteworthy for what they let you do with an unlimited interface. But it's also noteworthy in what you CANNOT do. In VR there's a lot of things you can't explicitly forbid trying to do, namely anything that's somewhat physical in your nearby space.

ethbr0 5y ago

Because this is approaching the web horizon, for those who don't know, Ken and Roberta Williams are pretty close to the SoCal version of Shigeru Miyamoto. They founded Sierra On-Line in 1979, which published pretty stellar titles until its sale in 1996 (and subsequent mismanagement and outright corporate fraud by the acquirer). Here are a list of the things they published, among which some were developed inhouse, among which some were developed by one or both of the Williams. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Sierra_Entertainment_video_games https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Sierra_Entertainment... PS: And on a personal note, I can't imagine my teenage years without Sierra. From King's Quest to Dynamix to Valve's Half-Life to Relic's Homeworld to Gearbox's initial Half-Life console ports, they survived far longer in an industry where so many don't... while putting out amazing stuff over decades. Or to put it another way, when they first started writing and publishing games, there was no Internet (in the modern sense) and Intel had just released the 10 MHz 8086 built on a 3000 nm (3 µm) node. By the time they left the company, the web and JavaScript existed, and Intel had just released the Klamath 300 MHz Pentium II on a 350 nm node. Crazy times.

slowmovintarget 5y ago
Hacking King's Quest on my middle school's Apple IIe was one of the ways I learned to code.
tomc1985 5y ago
Did they really have much of a role to play for Half-Life or Homeworld? By that point they were just a publisher.
- ethbr0 5y ago
  Supposedly they chose to publish Half-Life because they regretted turning down the chance to buy id, and thought Valve seemed like a good company. So I think they deserve some credit for recognizing talent.
VBprogrammer 5y ago
They also had a couple of really cool Nordhavn motor yachts which Ken has blogged about extensively, including crossing the Atlantic in their first one.

lolive 5y ago

I really hope we will die a lot in this game... Like in the good old times [1] [1]: https://youtu.be/KLPXP5KkcMQ https://youtu.be/KLPXP5KkcMQ

mancerayder 5y ago

I grew up on those Sierra adventure games -- LucasArts too! Would love to see these (and the Williams) come back in any form.

denton-scratch 5y ago

> interesting characters I played ADVENT for many hours, back in the day (on the boss's time). The only characters I remember are a dwarf, a pirate, a dragon, a bird, a giant, and a giant clam. OK, I suppose the bear and the troll might count as characters. None of these count as "interesting characters" - a chap that always says "Fee Fi Fo Foo" isn't particularly interesting, and none of the others has any dialogue.

LichenStone 5y ago

I really hope they make use of the Steam Audio API in the game, which can simulate sound reflections, occlusion, reverb, and HRTF directional positioning to the listener for sound sources. Would make a ton of sense for a cave environment.

hnthrowaway0315 5y ago

I'm actually thinking it makes a lot of sense to convert those dungeon crawlers (Dungeon Master for example) to VR. I'm wondering how much work is needed. One definitely needs to remodel the whole world and create new models for the monsters and items so it's essentially making a whole new game, plus a lot of gameplay code needs to be "converted" to VR. And how does one limit the actions of players in VR?

ndand 5y ago

"Roberta and I will be on Twitch tomorrow to talk about a new game we're working on. Our interview will be at 3pm Pacific time." https://twitter.com/caboken/status/1506390567197896705 https://twitter.com/caboken/status/1506390567197896705

spcebar 5y ago

For some background, Colossal Cave Adventure is arguably the first narrative computer game, and probably the first text adventure. It was developed in the 70s by Will Crowther (who helped create ARPANET) and Don Woods, who added most the game's puzzles. It's a very oldschool fantasy text adventure which, by today's standards, requires a lot of patience, but it created a genre and inspired games like Zork (and by extension Infocom), and Adventure for the 2600, which itself inspired many other games. Rick Adams has a great website dedicated to it with a lot of history and fun facts (https://rickadams.org/adventure/ https://rickadams.org/adventure/), and you can play the game directly on the site. Very exciting to see the Sierra crew taking this on. It seems like a bizarre thing to adapt but I'm a big fan of them and the original.

mintplant 5y ago
I discovered ADVENT because it was bundled in with DSLinux [0], the Linux distribution for the Nintendo DS. Poking through /bin, I thought it was going to be a little CLI advent calendar---imagine my surprise when the console started telling me a story! There was a long period in grade school where I was kinda obsessed with the game and its derivatives, especially Mike Arnautov's 770-point expansion [1]. I remember pulling apart his A-code sources (a custom DSL for implementing his versions of the game) to make my own additions to the world. From there I discovered the Inform 7 authoring system [2] and the wider text adventure/interactive fiction ecosystem. I came into the whole thing comparatively late (sometime in the late 2000s, I guess?), but Colossal Cave is still a huge part of my childhood. Expansions, ports, remixes, and re-imaginings are already a tradition for the game: even the version most people are familiar with is Don Woods's expansion of Will Crowther's original code. I'm psyched to see the Williams's contribution to the canon! [0] https://dslinux.org/ https://dslinux.org/ [1] https://mipmip.org/downloads.html https://mipmip.org/downloads.html [2] http://inform7.com/ http://inform7.com/
- anthk 5y ago
  Inform6 it's better if you like easy OOP and structured code. Get Inform Begginers Guide and Inform's Designers Manual. Both are free PDF files. You'll need Inform6 and the Inform 6 library (easy).

mrfusion 5y ago

Is there anywhere to play the original colossal cave adventure?

anthk 5y ago
Linux: install bsdgames, type down "advent". All: Get a Z-Machine interpreter (Frotz/Winfrotz/Lectrote) and "advent.z5" from here: https://ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/Advent.z5 https://ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/Advent.z5
jamesjamesm 5y ago
Here https://archive.org/details/msdos_Classic_Adventure_-_The_Original_Colossal_Cave_1996 https://archive.org/details/msdos_Classic_Adventure_-_The_Or...

dang 5y ago

Related: Roberta Williams, the Queen of Graphic Adventure Video Games - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30781307 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30781307 - March 2022 (no comments yet)

christkv 5y ago

I've started playing Kings quest 2 with the kids and oh my the amount of deaths. I had forgotten the pixel perfect walking needed not to plunge to your death. Kids are enjoying it though since they get all the fairy tale references.

auselen 5y ago

Ken’s book “Not All Fairy Tales Have Happy Endings” was a nice read: https://kensbook.com/faq/ https://kensbook.com/faq/

20wenty 5y ago
Audible version is great, too. https://www.audible.com/pd/Not-All-Fairy-Tales-Have-Happy-Endings-Audiobook/B08R6M34H9 https://www.audible.com/pd/Not-All-Fairy-Tales-Have-Happy-En...
selimthegrim 5y ago
I am really hoping for some Mixed-Up Mother Goose dirt (the first game I ever played on the Apple II in 1992)

egypturnash 5y ago

Initial promotional footage is... not very impressive. https://twitter.com/colossalcave3d/status/1506377702806196224 https://twitter.com/colossalcave3d/status/150637770280619622...

uxcolumbo 5y ago

I wish Ken & Roberta would work on a new 2D pixel art point&click game. Doing VR well takes a lot of effort, which would be better spent on story and creating beautiful pixel art - which somehow has a richness that VR can't seem to replicate (yet).

dekhn 5y ago

Dark Crystal (from their company) ruined adventure games for me. Later I found a cheat book and turns out you had to type a totally non-obvious command (LISTEN STREAM) in a specific location to unlock the rest of the game. No fun.

mehlmao 5y ago
The Old Man Murray piece "Death of Adventure Games" sums up my feelings on the genre. >Who killed Adventure Games? I think it should be pretty clear at this point that Adventure Games committed suicide. https://oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html https://oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html
aaron695 5y ago

magpi3 5y ago

I would like to see this happen for other games like the old Inform game Trinity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_(video_game)

gotaquestion 5y ago
I'm literally playing Trinity on an emulator right now. Not sure how I missed it back in the 80's but I'm really enjoying it. I'm stuck on the satellite door. Don't spoil it! Playing text adventures requires far more willpower today since the answers are easily accessible via the Internet. Not giving in to cheating really makes it feel old-school.

psyc 5y ago

Slash and Axl reunited. Ken and Roberta Williams making a game. What's next? _why reappears on TikTok?