Over the weekend at one of those “City-wide Garage Sales”, I found the following book:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The Book of Adventure Games<\/b>, by Kim Schuette, was released in 1985. The cover pretty much has it all: caves, a fire-breathing dragon, an overflowing treasure chest, and (of course) a lamp. Everybody’s got a lamp<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Book of Adventure Games contains entries for approximately 80 adventure games. Each entry contains a description of the game, a picture, maps, and a complete walk-thru list of commands. The walk-thru “spoilers” have been relocated to the back of the book away from the maps, but I can’t imagine wanting to look at one without the other. <\/p>\n

Most of the early Scott Adams and Infocom games can be found here. A few graphical adventures, such as Wizardry and Ultima, also have entries complete with maps. I sure wish I had known about this book back in 1985!<\/p>\n

The book’s introduction contains several one-page articles dealing with adventure games, such as “History of Adventures”, “What Makes a Good Adventure?”, “How to Tackle an Adventure Game”, and so on. It’s definitely interesting to read the perspective of adventure games from 1985. There are warnings that players may get frustrated by many of the games’ limited two-word parsers. The “History of Adventures” talks briefly about Dungeons and Dragons and mainframe computers before mentioning familiar milestones: Scott Adams’ cassette adventures, Colossal Cave, Roberta Williams’ Mystery House, and of course, Infocom (specifically, Deadline). <\/p>\n

According to Amazon, a sequel to this book (The Book of Adventure Games II<\/b>) was released later that same year (1985) and is readily available on the used market. Looks like I might need to own the pair!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over the weekend at one of those “City-wide Garage Sales”, I found the following book: The Book of Adventure Games, by Kim Schuette, was released in 1985. The cover pretty much has it all: caves, a fire-breathing dragon, an overflowing treasure chest, and (of course) a lamp. Everybody’s got a lamp. The Book of Adventure Games contains entries for approximately 80 adventure games. Each entry contains a description of the game, a picture, maps, and a complete walk-thru list of commands. The walk-thru “spoilers” have been relocated to the back of the book away from the maps, but I can’t… (read more)<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3200","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-interactive-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3200","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3200"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3200\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3200"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3200"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3200"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}