Comment on What are your defining memories of computing in the old days?

AndreaHill@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

• Harryd91@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I don’t know if it’s just me but did anyone ever actually complete those games? I might have just about finished Zork one time years later but for all the games I started that was about it. Good times though. Scott Adams will always be a hero of mine

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  • xyzzy@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Of course. I’ve played a number of them, although Zork quickly slowed its age (in terms of game design) compared to later text games.

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    • Harryd91@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      To be fair I would expect someone with a user name such as your to have played your fair share of them. I would usually get frustrated when my graph paper maps stopped making sense… Likely a ‘me’ problem I think

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      • xyzzy@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Some of them didn’t make it easy. Not all games were laid out on a strict grid (in fact, the very first one had numerous curving connections), and more than a few of the early games included a maze to intentionally make graphing difficult. Back then it was a lot easier to plug away for a couple months on a game like that, since there were so many fewer games and they were such a novelty.

        The dungeon crawler games like Wizardry made the same assumption about the player (“Of course they want a big challenge! How else will they get their money’s worth?”), and look how many people play that series today. Very, very few people have the patience in a saturated game market.

        I think later text games corrected those initial assumptions and the parsers became very good, and many even added graphics, but by then most people had moved on.

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