A 1981 ADVENTURE GAME, FINALLY AVAILABLE ON A NEW OLD PLATFORM
Below you will find a playable version of ARCTIC ADVENTURE that works right in your browser, as long as you have a physical keyboard. Type RUN and press return to get started. (If you have any issues, make sure to wait a couple of seconds for it to fully load before typing.)
Scroll down to learn more about this sparkling new version of an ancient game-running, for the first time ever, as far as I know, on Radio Shack's TRS-80 MC-10 platform. In color, even. Or at least with a green background.
If you want to know the whole ARCTIC ADVENTURE saga, head here. The shortish version is that I wrote the original version in Level II BASIC for the Radio Shack TRS-80 when I was a high school student in love with the text adventures written by the great Scott Adams. (No, not that one.) I modeled it closely on Adams' games and--unburdened by petty matters such as realism and scientific accuracy--didn't bother to do any research about the setting. I knew it was cold and polar bears lived there, and that was about it.
My game was published in a 1981 book of type-in adventures called CAPTAIN 80'S BOOK OF BASIC ADVENTURES. I got paid. But I didn't bother to save my creation, and the editor never got around to giving me a copy of the tome. To make matters worse, one of his associates told me that the printed version had a bug that rendered it unwinnable. Within a couple of years, I had given up on trying to write games for public consumption, in part because my writing career was going much better (and still is).
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