The Plot of the Phantom, a text adventure that took 40 years to finish
21 comments
·June 27, 2025vunderba
Nice job. I think it might be worth adding a few more verb synonyms to make the parser a little bit less strict - what's a few more years of development. :)
Like many other devs I also dipped my feet in the world of interactive fiction. As a kid I was just learning about concepts such as inheritance / OOP / etc. so I went a bit overboard on the ontology.
I remember pretty early on making a rather large mistake in that regard when a friend who was beta-testing the game for me at the time typed in commands like "get key", "get sword", "get ye flask", and then "get Aldwin" to which the game merrily replied "OK" and promptly stuffed an entire human being into the player's inventory.
paulgerhardt
Heh. I remember similarly spending a few hours inside LambdaMOO. Successfully managed to clone myself, put myself in my clone’s pocket, and then put my clone in my own pocket and kind of broke room reversal. It was only later I discovered this was an intentional mechanic/bug that some designers that used to create very, very difficult puzzles.
Weird things happen when you give your MOO players a REPL in LISP land.
amiga386
I once wrote an (Amylaar LPC) enemy who, if you attacked him and he was near death, would summon two comrades to fight for him.
Unfortunately, they're immediately hostile so you start attacking them too, and _they_ get near death and summon two comrades each, and so on. It turns into a Sorcerer's Apprentice scenario very quickly.
I managed to bring the MUD to a halt. An archwizard (not Yen Sid) had to instakill the enemies to avoid hitting their "near death" condition and creating more of them.
drewolbrich
I remember writing one of these and typing "put bag in bag" and then being confused why the bag disappeared from the world.
reactordev
This was a long running bug with merc based muds. The logic was to scan the room items first which cased the bug. Later versions would scan corpses first, then self, then room.
IggleSniggle
Should have done it the other way around
itsbenweeks
Much better to have the world disappear from the bag.
ThinkingGuy
I was there in the 1980s; writing your own Infocom-style text adventure games was a common project among my peers. There are probably lots of unfinished (or even finished-but-unshared) games out there on old floppy disks in closets.
I have a couple of my own, now archived on my home server.
kevindamm
I also have a few of those from the 80s but only as notes written on sheets of paper (including many pages of hand-written BASIC and sometimes in various shorthands) because my Atari 800 did not have a cassette drive peripheral with which to save them.
They were fun when they ran for 15-20 minutes, even after keying them in for hours.
frost_knight
Willing to share them?
noisy_boy
From a serial procrastinator, kudos and best of luck!
alienbaby
I spent a bit of time using PAWS on an amstrad pcw to pen my own text adventure masterpiece.
It's probably still down there packed up in the cellar ....
Maybe I should dig it out again.
bravesoul2
Had a quick play and it's fun, quirky, well written. I might just get into this. Damn rat!
apples_oranges
I wonder what "quick play" means in 2025 with our short attention spans
gbraad
... I thought he took 40 years to finish playing it. :-D
janeway
Wow, already stumbled into some good humour. Well done
As a kid, the first text adventure I encountered with "The Cave" a text-choice game created by another student in the same town I lived. Our common teacher had created a "Computer Club" newsletter, to share programs between schools.
Then at a junior college I encountered Adventure, Zork (the full version), Mystery Mansion, and Warp on an HP 3000/terminal mini-computer system.
I began writing text adventures myself, bigger and bigger, and with higher and higher ambitions in terms of complexity, story and world scope, parsing. My "Command English" parser was an incredibly versatile subset of English.
At home I had an IBM Jr (Hey, I loved it!), whose BASIC didn't have GOSUB, so I invented a stack for the parser using strings. (Used strings as a heap in another program to create a very slow 3D vector graphics program.)
In high school I wrote this massive text adventure called Wanderer. I was so proud of it, until the day I went to save it on my floppy disk, at which time it wrote all over the previous version only to abort because it was to big for the disk. No pre-write size check! :(
That was the last one I wrote. But by pushing every text adventure to new levels of capability, over and over, I learned a lot about programming, and developed a habit of innovating in program styles, and domain languages, to match problems.
I wish I had the source for all those programs, but these were the days of many incompatible computers, and storage media that decayed quickly.
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I would love a Mac version of those four text adventures mentioned above. Mystery Mansion seems to have become particularly forgotten.
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"The Plot of the Phantom" makes me so happy! Thank you Scott Andrew!!!
(Completely random, but reading the opening scene, it struck me how perverse it would be to get deeply into the game and find out I was in the text adventure equivalent of "Deliverance"! That would almost be art, lol. Like novels, text adventures are a medium that naturally supports much greater freedom, than visual mediums.)