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September 7, 2021 12:00 pm

Developer Returns To Game After Four Decades, Discovers and Fixes Typo So It Works

joshuark writes: Harry McCracken is not the name of a Cold War superspy, but a man who is now the tech editor of Fast Company and, in his younger days, a developer of games for Radio Shack's TRS-80 microcomputer. McCracken, who is also a regular Slashdot reader, recently went back to have a look at his first game, Arctic Adventure, which he wrote when he was 16 around 1980-81 -- a text adventure inspired by the work of Scott Adams in particular, a pioneering designer of the Adventure series of games for the TRS-80. As was common in the 80s, Arctic Adventure was distributed in book form. This was The Captain 80 Book of BASIC Adventures: pages of type-it-yourself BASIC code, each entry its own adventure game. [...] "Decades later, I didn't spend much time thinking about Arctic Adventure, but I never forgot the fact that I hadn't received a copy of the Captain 80 book. Thanks to the internet, I eventually acquired one. But typing in five-and-a-half pages of old BASIC code seemed onerous, even if it was code I'd written." McCracken eventually got around to it this July. "After five or six tedious typing sessions on my iPad, I had Arctic Adventure restored to digital form. That was when I made an alarming discovery: As printed in the Captain 80 book, the game wasn't just unwinnable, but unplayable. It turned out that it had a 1981 typo that consisted of a single missing '0' in a character string. It was so fundamental a glitch that it rendered the game's command of the English language inoperable. You couldn't GET SHOVEL let alone complete the adventure."

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