Adventureland

A voice BOOOOMS out: Welcome to Adventure number 1 “ADVENTURELAND” … What shall I do now?

This is one of the first things you’re presented with after inserting the cartridge and typing SYS32592 and it was a bit of a shock.  Where’s the graphics?  How do I start this game?  Is it a game?  Oh my god have I just blown my hard saved pocket money on this?  What shall I do now?

To put that in to context, back in the day as an eleven year old standing in the Walsall branch of Boots’ excellent computer & electronic department (yes, it used to sell more interesting things than paracetamol and baby wipes) I was pondering the choice between a cartridge game with enticing box art or a considerably cheaper game on tape.  The big box with the impressive artwork won hands down, afterall it was on cartridge so it must be better.

So here I am back home facing the message “What shall I do now?“.  You see Adventureland is a text adventure game and this was the first time I’d come across one.  No spaceships whizzing by, no frogs hopping about, no graphics at all.  Even the joystick seemed redundant.  The instructions booklet was a puzzle in itself, waffling on about drawing maps or something.  Having spending so much monies on it I wasn’t about to give up that easily and after much trial and error it all suddenly clicked into place.

Instead of those spaceships and frogs hopping about, the game describes where you are, what has changed and what is going on as if you were reading a story.  Only instead of a linear page turning experience you controlled the main character and the story moved with you.  To interact with this world you typed short commands in the form of “verb noun” such as climb tree or walk north.  To help reduce RSI, or maybe it was also because it took up less memory, you could shorten words to the beginning three letters.  There were also some shortcuts for common commands such as “n” instead of “walk north”, “i” instead of “inventory” and “l” instead of look for example.

With the concept of how the game works sorted I must have spent a good year playing through it, exploring further into its world and obtaining the *treasures* needed to complete your adventure.  Adventureland is pretty basic by modern text adventure standards but this is one reason I like it so much.  It’s very easy to get in to, with plenty of puzzles to challenge you without being too frustrating.  The fantasy setting and the pace of the game play fits together well, something that I felt was weaker in later games in the series.  Other versions of the game released on more powerful platforms had graphics accompanying the text location descriptions which while nice, they kind of made it into a picture book and as such diluted the power of the words on your imagination.

Maybe it’s because the Vic 20 version was my first encounter of a text adventure, or maybe there is something just magical about it, but Adventureland is the only text adventure I have returned to time and time again.  If you’ve never played it before … now is a good time to try it out.  See the video below for tips on how to play it in the VICE emulator and if you get stuck I have placed a copy of the solution under the extras section of this site.

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2 Responses to “Adventureland”

1. First PC game you ever played - Page 24 - Overclock.net - Overclocking.net says:

   Thursday 18th June 2009 at 4:23 am

   [...] It was the humble beggings of a mild lifelong addiction . Here is a link that explains it further. http://www.vic20gamer.com/index.php/…adventureland/ Almost thirty years later, i still remember my character’s name , [...]

   Reply
2. First PC game you ever played - Page 25 - Overclock.net - Overclocking.net says:

   Thursday 18th June 2009 at 5:10 am

   [...] It was the humble beggings of a mild lifelong addiction . Here is a link that explains it further. http://www.vic20gamer.com/index.php/…adventureland/ Almost thirty years later, i still remember my character’s name , Gimili Right on, man, we’re [...]

   Reply