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jbickers (3)

Before the Infocom text parser allowed computer games to understand complex sentences, and long before Watson was coded to parse and comprehend natural language, adventure gamers had to solve every problem presented to them with just two words: a verb followed by a noun. The father of the text adventure game was Scott Adams (no, not that one), and his games, which were published by his company Adventure International, are freely playable on a number of different sites and devices - and many of them are fiendishly challenging to this day.
posted by jbickers on Feb 17, 2011 - 38 comments

"My boss told me not to work on it, because it was impossible to do on the Atari 2600 console, which had only 1/8 K of RAM and 4K of ROM." But creating the world's first video game easter egg might not even be Warren Robinett's most remarkable achievement. [more inside]
posted by jbickers on Apr 3, 2009 - 37 comments

Don Hodges writes scholarly (but readable) articles on the mathematics and logic of classic video games - with a special emphasis on kill screens, such as "Stage Zero" in Galaga, Level 22 in Donkey Kong, and the legendary split screen at the end of Pac-Man. More here. [more inside]
posted by jbickers on Jul 30, 2008 - 30 comments