In the early 1980s, when computer games were often distributed as lines of code, you had to write yourself, a TRS-80 teen, and future Fast company technology editor Harry McCracken had a text adventure called Arctic Adventure published a Captain 80’s book of basic adventures. As it was posted, the game code was broken. Forty years later, McCracken finally fixed it.
The first computer magazines were full of pages of code so that PC enthusiasts could write and play. I remember spending hours as a preteen sitting in front of my dad’s computer, hunting and pecking all over the keyboard while entering someone else’s BASIC code. Once I entered all the code, I would have a game to play or several more hours of code review to see what I entered wrong. Those were the days.
How it is chronicled on the website he made about his Arctic Adventure saga, young McCracken was in high school when he wrote his Arctic-themed adventure game, PC player reported. Inspired by the work of the legendary adventure game developer Scott Adams, McCracken created a survival game that commissioned the player to return to his base before succumbing to the harsh Arctic environment. He had no knowledge of the Arctic and did absolutely no research, but he is fine. It’s not like someone checked it out on Wikipedia.
The game was released, McCracken was paid and continued to create a couple more games before shifting his focus to creative writing. The only comment he received Arctic Adventure it was from a person related to the software company that belonged to the book’s publisher, Bob “Captain 80” Liddil, who told him the game wasn’t working.
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Having never received a copy of the book, his code was published, and he had not kept any copy of the code himself, McCracken spent the next four decades or so doingArctic Adventure related things.
Thanks to Internet archivists, however, he recently acquired a copy The book of Captain 80 of the basic adventures, and with the help of a TRS-80 emulator for his iPad, he managed to write his code and launch the game. It just didn’t work at all.
After five or six tedious typing sessions on my iPad, I did Arctic Adventure restored to digital form. That’s when I made an alarming discovery: as printed in the Captain ’80 book, the game not only could not be won, but could not be played. It turned out to have a 1981 typo that was missing a “0” in a string. It was such a fundamental mistake that it made the mastery of the game in English inoperative. You couldn’t GET SHOVEL, let alone complete the adventure (the goal is to get back to your base).
McCracken has no idea how the error message occurred. Maybe it was something that made book publishers not catch up. Maybe it was a typo. In any case, it doesn’t matter now. Arctic Adventure is restored and can be played in the web browser using a browser-based TRS-80 emulator on the McCracken website. I tried it myself and in fact I could GET SHOVEL, GET COAT, WEAR COAT and get out, out of my starting igloo and diving headlong into the Arctic desert.
Does anyone else have chills?