A game that was unbeatable for forty years just got an update

September 7, 2021 2:01 AM

Forty years ago, Arctic Adventure was released for the TRS-80 with bugs that made it unwinnable. Now, the bugs have been fixed and you can play it in your browser.
posted by Kaatridge (14 comments total)

Spot the bug!

1240 DATA "GETTAKGRAGO RUNCLIENTDROTHRINVWEADIGEXASEALOOHELUSEQUIENDEATOPEMELUNL
SCOSAVLOASHOFIRSAYYELSHO", "0100100100200200200200300300400500600700700700800901
0010011012013014015016017018018019019019"
1250 DATA "SHOCOANORSOUEASWESOUTUP IGLSMAFLOOCEWAT***CHELARDIVSUITWORADCAVDOWICE
BRITRAPOSHOMESKCABSUPSIGPOLBEAFLARATFOODOOBOOWEIKEYHOLFIRBROMEDRUMHARSLEDOGGUNOC
TWRESHIMUSYOH
1260 DATA 0010020030040050060070080090090100110110120130130140140150150160170180
19019020021022022023024024025026026027028028029030031032032033034035035036037038
038039040
1270 DATA 0010010030030030030030030030030030030030030010010010010010010030030010
01003003003003003003003003003003001001001003001001001001003003002002001003003003
003003003002002

From the Captain 80 Book of BASIC Adventures, chapter 17, "Arctic Adventure", p. 239
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 2:43 AM on September 7, 2021 [5 favorites]

So, you like the TRS-80, eh? HAVE ALL THE TRS-80 PROGRAMS IN THE WORLD!

_{I don't understand it. Jason Dyer went mad in fifteen minutes!}
posted by BiggerJ at 2:53 AM on September 7, 2021 [5 favorites]

Oh sure, gamers, it was too hard for you, eh? I guess that makes it a metaphor for Dark Souls.
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:05 AM on September 7, 2021 [2 favorites]

tl;dr of the bug:

I still can't explain how that could have happened. For one thing, I played my own game continuously as I wrote it, which I couldn't have done if the bug had been there all along. (I may have been a sloppy and inattentive teenager, but I wasn't *that* unobservant.) For another, THE CAPTAIN 80 BOOK OF BASIC ADVENTURES credited a "program editor" whom you'd hope would have tried each adventure out before committing it to print. If he had, and the error was present, he would have noticed its effects immediately.

I had trouble reading the font, copy&paste were not working, and there was no reader view to make it more legible, so it took me a bit of time to find the relevant bit.
posted by the antecedent of that pronoun at 5:26 AM on September 7, 2021 [2 favorites]

Ooh, I remember Scott Adams adventures on my Model 1 Level 2!
posted by Flight Hardware, do not touch at 6:46 AM on September 7, 2021

Accurately reliving my late 80s/early 90s "gaming" experience by getting about 50 moves in and being stuck as hell despite apparently 'examining' everything and trying to use everything on everything.
posted by AFII at 8:29 AM on September 7, 2021 [1 favorite]

Oh, this gives me all kinds of nostalgia.

Bah. I can't go anywhere. The ice floe just sits there.
posted by doctornemo at 9:42 AM on September 7, 2021

I have a pretty good sized catalog of CoCo programs from CoCo Cassette and Chromasette that I mentioned in passing to Jason Scott, but never got back to him on how to proceed with donating to archive. This is a good reminder I better hurry and deal with that.

Funny how a single nothing can mean the difference between even getting your foot in the door (let alone winning) and... nothing at all.
posted by symbioid at 11:40 AM on September 7, 2021

The first game I ever made was a text adventure, and I was... maybe 10. Every single thing was if/then, with NO way to, you know, check inventory. Or HAVE an inventory. I didn't know about variables.
The whole thing branched from one point like a cladogram, and I gave up when I was writing the same thing 20 times (once if you had this in your inventory, once if you'd chosen this choice earlier, once if you typed 'go south', once if you typed 'move south', once if you typed 'travel south'...) It was qbasic and I don't even know if copy/paste was a thing then.

It even had animations! Which I did by spamming lines of text including lots of blank lines to clear the screen.

I loved text adventures, but I never finished ANY that I played. They were just all so hard! I took that to heart, and nobody who tried my 'game' could get past the first room. Because the solution was just in my head and I gave no clues. Like I thought was proper!

All of which is mostly to say that as an adult I just tried this and... the ice floe just sits there. I think that all text adventures are unbeatable even without bugs.
posted by Acari at 2:59 PM on September 7, 2021 [3 favorites]

I'd seen this recently, but I resisted playing until I got some software for mapping back up and running. The "perceptive review" has a map (yay, I don't have to build one) though it's filled with spoilers. (It reads like a walkthrough.)

Typos: brrr. Antic Magazine, which focused on the Atari 8-bit computers, used a utility they called TYPO so you could be sure you'd typed things in correctly.
posted by Pronoiac at 1:33 AM on September 8, 2021

Note: You can pet the dog!

(I have messaged @CanYouPetTheDog)
posted by Pronoiac at 2:04 AM on September 8, 2021

Until we could afford a Vic-20, we would beg for time on my friend's TRS-80 and laboriously type in Creative Computing programs and play a few games. It all paid off in the long run, as this early exposure to computers led to a lucrative career as an English teacher. Also, the font on that emulator makes my eyes bleed. Was the original font that terrible?
posted by mecran01 at 6:40 AM on September 8, 2021

OK having now seen the spoiler I realise that I could have sat here until the cobwebs formed and still never completed it. I feel less stupid now.
posted by AFII at 8:19 AM on September 8, 2021

Back in university days one friend would write letters to people within adventure games. You had to fire up the game and solve it in order to get to the message.
posted by doctornemo at 12:50 PM on September 8, 2021