[Coco] Anyone still play text adventure games?

[Sean]

Well that's quite a tangent for this thread, but I loved the Qix game.
Also loved Black Sanctum, but I only played the one with graphics.
Didn't know there was a text only version.


On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 10:33 PM, Steve Ostrom <smostrom7 at comcast.net> wrote:
> A group of us at work bought one of the first Cocos available in the
> Minneapolis area.  We also purchased the Black Sanctum text adventure when
> that was available, and played the adventure during every lunch break for
> weeks.  I so fell in love with Black Sanctum that I decided to write my own
> adventure.  Our small work group then played my adventure and everyone
> seemed to like it, and suggested I try to sell it.  I sent it away to Tom
> Mix and to Dennis Lewandowski of DSL Computer Products, and both took it and
> sold it for about a year.  Graphic adventures were just then beginning to be
> popular, so my text adventure never really earned a lot of royalty money.
> Tom Mix actually scolded me for getting rid of a few areas in the adventure
> by making it fit into a 16K Coco, but I thought that would increase it's
> selling market.   Oh, well.  I'll never make money in Marketing.  The
> adventure is called Shipwrek, and was eventually sold to T&D for one of
> their issues.
>
> That relationship with Tom Mix enabled me to start some assembly
> programming.  I was playing the game Qix in the arcades, and asked Tom if he
> was developing a similar game for the Coco.  He said no, but would love to
> have it.  He asked if I could write it.  I knew nothing of assembly language
> programming at that time, and I learned a lot about 6809 assembly during
> that exercise.  Tom kept encouraging me, and I kept sending him my updates
> on a weekly basis.  He was telling me that the author of his Donkey Kong
> game was pulling down huge royalties every month.  Then my first child was
> born and the development slowed.  I finally told Tom that I couldn't meet
> his deadlines.  He asked if it would be OK to give my code to another
> developer who wanted to try that same game, and I said of course.  Needless
> to say, about 3 months later, Tom was selling a very good version of Qix.
> Somewhere, the author did credit me with having helped, but his final
> product was so much better than mine that I had little to do with it.  I was
> able to make a good spinning Qix, and developed the game play and the
> scoring.  I never did finish any sound effects or sparks.
>
> After that attempt, I just did assembly language programming on some fun
> stuff.  Mark and Boisy have a BASIC program that wll back up a full 256
> drive hard drive, and I wrote that same program in machine language, which
> runs about twice as fast.  That was disappointing to me, but I think the
> speed of the drives is the limiting factor, not the programming.  My ML
> version of that program was actually written and hand assembled on paper
> only while at my family's lake cabin one summer.  Hand coding and hand
> assembly is really cool if you really want to learn exactly what your code
> is doing.  I never did use an assembler on that code, but just dumped the ML
> code into DATA statements.  I still use that ML code to back up all my
> software from one HD to another.
>
> -- Steve --
>