Using a VM was common for text adventures of the time; check out the Z-Machine used by Infocom games: http://inform-fiction.org/zmachine/standards/ http://infor

Using a VM was common for text adventures of the time; check out the Z-Machine used by Infocom games: http://inform-fiction.org/zmachine/standards/ http://inform-fiction.org/zmachine/standards/ Like this game you describe here, the Z-Machine also stored characters in less than one byte, packing three characters (plus an extra control bit) into two bytes (http://inform-fiction.org/zmachine/standards/z1point1/sect03.html http://inform-fiction.org/zmachine/standards/z1point1/sect03...)