Get this Freakin' Duck Off of Me!

May 11, 2007 3:58 PM

Adventure II (a sequel to Adventure, here's a playable version of the original)
posted by bardic (23 comments total)

I love the fact that, despite the advance in graphics quality and capability, the player character is still a yellow dot.
posted by lekvar at 4:07 PM on May 11, 2007

$40 for a 5200 game, in 2007?
posted by JHarris at 4:08 PM on May 11, 2007

That's $15.44 per console/year!
posted by L. Fitzgerald Sjoberg at 4:21 PM on May 11, 2007

Can anyone tell me why I spent hours and hours and hours playing this game in 1985? So many hours that I ended up with a joystick blister?
posted by mudpuppie at 4:23 PM on May 11, 2007

The age of boutique console nostalgia is upon us.
posted by cortex at 4:27 PM on May 11, 2007

Wow it's just as bad as I remember.
posted by iconomy at 4:29 PM on May 11, 2007

is there an easter egg in this one?
posted by jonson at 4:35 PM on May 11, 2007

OMG, I just navigated the maze automatically, and I haven't even seen this game in at least 20 years.

I wonder what other skills are lurking in the back of my brain. Quick! get me a guitar, I gotta know if I can still play blister in the sun and rock lobster.
posted by milovoo at 4:35 PM on May 11, 2007

Can anyone tell me why I spent hours and hours and hours playing this game in 1985? So many hours that I ended up with a joystick blister?

I did the same.

1985 was a pretty terrible year, though.
posted by Pogo_Fuzzybutt at 4:40 PM on May 11, 2007

I did too...but that's the summer that "Power of Love" was the #1 song, and I thought that pop music was finished.
posted by Liosliath at 4:58 PM on May 11, 2007

I highly recommend hobbyist VCS programming.

After working for a while in pure emulation, a couple of years ago I bought a homebrew e.e. project called a Krokodile Commander (Krokocart), which is basically a gutted VCS cartridge with an eeprom slapped cleverly inside. The first time I burned assembled code onto it from my mac and saw a program I had written running on a tv, off of a cartridge, driven by a real VCS, was totally wicked awesome.
posted by psmith at 5:13 PM on May 11, 2007

Seemed that in the VCS days, everyone loved Adventure. After I got my copy, I hooked everyone who came in contact with this classic title, including my sport-crazy cousins in their early 20s who never touched video games.

Here's to you, Warren Robinett! Fantastic game that was utterly compelling despite the 2600's limitations, and the easter egg was sheer genius.
posted by porn in the woods at 5:27 PM on May 11, 2007

I hope they get sued for the tens of dollars in lost profit by Atari.
posted by MiltonRandKalman at 5:33 PM on May 11, 2007

What duck?
posted by sparkletone at 5:41 PM on May 11, 2007

My dad got Adventure for me for Christmas the year it came out. Apparently he stayed up all night on Christmas Eve playing it. He already had it beaten before I even got to fire it up.
posted by acetonic at 6:15 PM on May 11, 2007

Oh yeah, check out distellamap for cool visualization of VCS code. I've got a print of Adventure framed on the wall of my office at work.

If you look closely you can see where Warren Robinett inserted his own name as a credit in the graphics data.
posted by psmith at 7:12 PM on May 11, 2007 [2 favorites]

I also think $40 is a bit stiff. Come on, it's clearly a labor of love - release a version you can play through Stella.
posted by fungible at 7:25 PM on May 11, 2007

I left Adventure, my brother loved venture

heretic...
posted by Mick at 7:40 PM on May 11, 2007

lekvar - you were expecting a cube, maybe?
posted by griphus at 10:22 PM on May 11, 2007

Ya, well, I want Suspended for my cell phone.
posted by The Deej at 11:50 PM on May 11, 2007

I also think $40 is a bit stiff. Come on, it's clearly a labor of love - release a version you can play through Stella.

Stella is for 2600 games. You'd need something else to play this 5200 game.

Games like this - delivered on expensive-to-make cartridges and including a plethora of supplementary printed material - retailed for $30 or so twenty-five years ago; factor in a little inflation (1982's $30 is about about 2007's $64) and the inefficiencies of a tiny production run, and $40 sounds like a bargain indeed.
posted by Western Infidels at 5:48 AM on May 12, 2007

Mick, I can still see the Venture arcade machine on Easton's Beach in Newport, RI as a kid. The machine art was this fantastic looking Conan ripoff. Even then, the game seemed a let down after looking at the machine.
posted by yerfatma at 6:17 AM on May 12, 2007

I got that joystick blister too, mudpuppie and I recall the game being so frustrating and never being able to figure it out. The blue hedgemaze was really what ruined it for me. That was like twenty years ago.

Last night I tried the playable version and figured it out from start to finish in like twenty minutes. I don't get it.
posted by ZachsMind at 11:39 AM on May 12, 2007