Adventureworld

An old rogue-like computer game from the early 1990's

Adventureworld was an old rogue-like computer game that was originally written by myself and John Zaitseff as part of the ZAP group in 1990-1991 on the Microbee computer.

It was originally written in MicroWorld Basic on a machine with no more than 32Kb of RAM. Adventureworld, at the time, tested the limits of the memory of the computer. Even removing all comments from the original code (they were kept in precious memory) and renumbering the line numbers to gain a byte per call (GOTO 10 took up 1 byte less space than GOTO100). In the end I was not able to add any further code as the game crashed with ‘out of memory’ errors.

Adventureworld History

The original Adventureworld was only ever played with a small group of friends during lunchtime at our school. It was never distributed or shared with other computers (as there was no internet ‘as we know it’ back then). Over time a few more people at school heard about adventureworld and by the end of the year we had the whole computer room (about 16 Microbee computers) all downloading the game from a central ‘server’ via Beenet (The MicroBee’s own network) and playing Adventureworld instead of people doing computing studies.

The remains of the original source code as it is today

Sadly the original disk with the data has probably been lost to time (even if I had the disk I have no way of reading the data back). The only known copy of the original source of Adventureworld is a computer printout with hand written notes scrawled along the side for comments. The printout is also starting turn yellow and getting that old manuscript smell too. So perhaps it is time to resurrect it.

Adventureworld begins.. again

Now after 20 years, I’m attempting to bring the past into the future using modern graphics and processing power, but still retaining the old classic ‘green screen’ feel and beeps that the original Microbee had.

I am currently planning on re-coding Adventureworld onto a modern day game engine (currently undecided), as it will allow me to easily deploy Adventureworld to multiple platforms.

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