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Adventureland is an early, formative work of interactive fiction. It is a computer game written by Scott Adams, and was not only the first text adventure game to be commercially published and sold for the then-new home computers, but was the first commercially available adventure game of any kind for use on personal computers.


Description

Gameplay involved moving between the various locations found within the game, collecting found objects (and often subsequently using them, generally in another location), and the solving of puzzles. Adventureland was a very characteristic, fantasy adventure, and the first in a series of twelve adventure games from Adams, and his company, Adventure International.

The game commands took the form of either simple, two-word, verb/noun phrases, such as "Climb Tree," or one-word commands, such as those used for player character movement, including north, south, east, west, up, and down. Although the game had a vocabulary of about 120 words, the parser only recognised the first three letters. This meant that the parser occasionally identified a word incorrectly, but also that commands could be truncated, for example "lig lam" would be interpreted as "light lamp."

In order to complete the game, the adventurer had to collect the thirteen lost artifacts: A statue of Paul Bunyan''s blue ox, Babe, the jeweled fruit, the golden fish, a dragon''s egg, a golden net, a magic carpet, a diamond necklace, a diamond bracelet, a pot of rubies, the "royal honey", a crown, a magic mirror, and a "firestone."

The game was available on a number of platforms, including the Apple II series of computers, and various computers released by Atari, Commodore International, and Texas Instruments. A cut-down three treasure version entitled ''Adventure 0: Special Sampler'' was also made available at a special low price

In 1982, Adventureland was re-released with graphics, thus enabling the player to view video representations of the scenery and objects to be found within the game.

Development

Adventureland, Adams'' first program, is a slightly scaled-down, machine-language game similar to the “original” Adventure program.[6] The source code for Adventureland was published in Byte magazine in 1980, and the database format was subsequently used in other interpreters such as Brian Howarth''s Mysterious Adventures series.