Hi all,
Just a quick little update here. I'm going to be gone for a couple of weeks, as I'm going on a holiday soon. There likely won't be any time on this trip for working on the blog, (and I've also had little time to write this week through a mixture of illness and work) so it made sense to put it on break for a little while.
I'm planning for the blog to return on the 10th of November, where 1973 coverage will return with Atari's Gotcha.
Release Date: October, 1973
Platform: Mainframe (BASIC type-in)
Genre: Racing, Simulation
Developer(s): N/A
Publisher(s): Creative Computing Software
Here in Australia, one of our TV broadcasters airs a weekly show called Speedweek. Like its name suggests, it's a weekly motorsport wrap-up, covering all sorts of Australian racing competitions, from track racing, to motocross, to even speedboats. I used to love checking in on it every weekend, and one of the sections I most looked forward to was the drag racing. These insane, purpose built monsters with tyres taller than a person that spat flames everywhere and needed parachutes to help them stop, were awe-inspiring to me as a child. I don't keep up with it now (heck, my house doesn't even have a TV signal,) but I remember those days fondly. That, the V8 Supercars and Top Gear spurned a keen interest in cars and motorsport in me.
And then there was the video games. Naturally, racing games have historically been one of my favourite genres, growing up with the early and Black Box-era Need for Speed games, as well as Project Gotham Racing, Gran Turismo and Forza Motorsport. Need for Speed Underground 2 currently sits on my personal top 10 games of all time list. It's not quite my favourite genre (that would be RPGs) but, I still love racing games, and I'm excited to see the earliest racing games in action.
One such racing game is today's topic. Drag is a text game based on those awe-inspiring Top Fuel and Funny Car drag racing machines. It's not the first racing game - that title probably goes to the lost Can-Am from 1972 - but it's an example of what early game developers were thinking and wanting to do with a genre like racing, which was hardly a genre at all in 1973. Sure, Space Race technically counts as a "racing" game, but it's a very different kind of racing game.
Sadly, there's very little information on Drag available. We don't even have an author. All we know on its background comes from More BASIC Computer Games, which tells us that Drag was sourced from the Hewlett-Packard User Library. The October '73 date of publication comes from the game's Sol-20 source code. Creative Computing's code in More BASIC Games edits the date part out.
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| More BASIC Computer Games. |
Also, it's time to debut a new resource in this article: Creative Computing Magazine. As I'm sure I've mentioned somewhere along the line, Creative Computing is the company David Ahl founded after leaving DEC. CC's magazine first appeared in October 1974, and ran until the end of 1985. I know I'm not into 1974 coverage yet, but it's relevant to bring this up now, as Drag appears in the Jan '77 issue of CC magazine. It still has no author attached to it, but it retains the unmodified source code. I find it funny that they call it a "new game," despite being 4 years old at its time of inclusion. That's an eternity in video game years; some home consoles don't even last that long.
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| Apparently we're drag racing in the 1900s. |
The Creative Computing Magazine archive can be found here. It'll also be in the Recommended Resources page from now on, under the Books & Magazines heading.
And that's it. Yeah, that's all the information we've got.
Drag not only has you race a dragster, but you also get to design several aspects of your machine. Horsepower, rear end ratio, tyre width and tyre diameter are the available metrics, and there's no limits to them. As Creative Computing's articles say, you can create a dragster with 2 million horsepower, but in practice it won't work. The engine you'd need to generate that much power would be massive! They also say that the computer opponent is quite hard to beat...
Now, it's probably fine to jump into Drag thinking of the kind of top fuel drag racing of today, where specially made cars can generate thousands of horsepower. Top fuel was active in 1973, but I'm not sure it was quite at the same power levels that 2025 reaches. Looking at the example game provided in More BASIC Computer Games, it selects 790 horsepower. The magazine only does 370hp. For reference, the fastest production cars of the day capped out in the high 300s/low 400s in horsepower. No Bugatti Veyrons around in those days.
All that is to say that I wasn't sure on how to approach designing a dragster for this game. I honestly don't know anything about what makes a good dragster - I like cars and motorsport, but I know very little of the mechanics behind it.
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| Rookie dragster on the scene here. Go easy on me. |
After the game gave me the run down of instructions, and I asked to play the computer (you can choose to play against another person,) we come to designing the beast. I chose to base my stats somewhat off of what's in the book and magazine for my first run. I went with what I thought was a conservative 500hp, went with a rear-end ratio of 5:1, tyre width of 18 inches, and tyre diameter of 2.8 feet.
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| The very cluttered table suggests I'm behind. I have more rubber, though. |
And then, we let the car loose. With the way my DOSBox settings were, the game took a while to calculate the results. The computer's car (#1) stopped "burning rubber" first, with mine (#2) taking a couple more seconds to stop. However, I was slower over the few seconds of the race, so despite that, I still lost by about 35 feet.
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| Not enough, however. |
Now comes the fun part of figuring out what I need to adjust to make the car faster. My thoughts were that the approach needed is to adjust the stats one at a time and compare results after each run. Horsepower was probably fine as is, so I started adjustments with the rear end ratio. I also turned up the cycle speed slightly in DOSBox to try and speed things along a little.
I tried upping the rear end ratio to 5.5 first. At first, there was no difference at all, but at the very end of the race, I ended up with slightly worse results. I reverted it back to 5 and try changing tire width instead. I upped the width to 20 inches, and this provided a marginal improvement in speed. Must be worth trying again, right? I tried 22 inches for the next round.
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| Getting closer... |
This results in another small improvement! The two tyre adjustments have so far resulted in closing the gap by about 10 feet. Probably best to keep pushing it until increasing tire width stops having benefits.
The increases starting becoming more negligible the further I pushed tyre width. I stopped at 26 inches, as my later speed was beginning to decrease. The gap had closed to 20 feet by this time.
The next aspect to look at was tyre diameter. First I'd look at increasing it to 3 feet, and see what that did. This got me another little step closer, but the noticeable change here was that my car stopped burning rubber a second earlier.
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| These settings got me over 1300ft for the first time. |
Changing the diameter more produced interesting results. At 3.2 feet, I was closer to matching the computer's speed, but I stopped burning rubber at the same time as him, and ended up being a little further behind at the end.
I decided to revert back to 3 feet for diameter, and starting working on horsepower instead. Upping it to 550hp got me the closest I'd been so far, only 11 feet off the pace. More power! 600hp improved again, but only minimally. Worth trying more power, regardless, but my guess at this point that the tyres would need to be changed to accommodate more power. Upgrading to 650hp has my car stop burning rubber at the same point as the computer again, and I had a worse finish. Back to tyres.
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| Getting even closer... |
The combination that got me really close was tuning down to 630hp, and upping tyre width to 30 inches. It put me neck-and-neck with the computer up until the end, where I faltered a little more than previously. I thought horsepower might need more tweaking.
And it did... but a whole lot else needed tweaking, too. I spent a fair bit of time tinkering with settings. At first, I thought wider tires was the solution. To a point, it was. They'd get me off the line faster, but the car would lose speed faster as the tyres burnt out earlier and earlier. I tried messing with the rear end ratio, but I definitely fluked out on getting it right straight away. Any adjustments away from 5 just made things worse. Tyre diameter can't go any larger than 3.4, else the tyres burn out immediately.
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| Nope. |
Eventually, after at least a couple of hours of tweaking, I did it. What led to the breakthrough was something that, on the surface, seemed counter intuitive - narrower tyres. While wider tyres built up more speed at the start, they lost more speed at the back end of the race. Narrower tyres don't pick up speed as quickly, but they're better at maintaining speed through the race. 28 inches ended up being the magic number. I also discovered that pairing narrower tires with the maximum tyre diameter of 3.4 worked the best.
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| A winner is me...??? |
With those numbers locked in, it was just a matter of getting the horsepower right. One of my better earlier attempts started at 650hp, so that's where I started. Increasing by 5hp each run, my times improved up until 665hp, where the game declared me the winner! But, it didn't feel quite right. The computer hit 1320 ft, and 665hp with all those other settings only got me to 1319.957. I wasn't sure if the game was right. I needed to see that 1320 number, so I kept going.
664hp. Time: 1320.001
Done. I did it. Boy, that felt satisfying. I punched the air a few times when I saw the 1320 come up. After inching closer and closer towards it over the previous hour, one can imagine the excitement of finally nailing it.
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| Photo finish! |
We're taking our winnings from the drag strip back to the casino, but not before sidestepping into a questionable game of tag.
Don't forget - if you enjoy my blog, be sure to leave a comment and follow so you don't miss any updates!
Get used to seeing these from time to time. If I'm being generous, I'd say that it's come about because I'm constantly learning and refining my process. If not, I'd just say that I'm fickle and never fully content with my scoring system.
I won't go through the changes in painstaking detail like I did last time. I don't think that's necessary, and it would take far too long considering the amount of games we've got on the list now. It's getting close to 50, which seems like a lot, but it's barely a grain of sand in the grand context of video game history.
All I'll say is that I shifted my philosophy on a few metrics, and started using a letter grade as a reference help for game design and fun factor. This helps me better understand what's a "passing grade," more-or-less.
The major change that took place was with how I approach visuals from now on. I'm not putting every text game at a base 5 anymore. They'll all start from a 1, and earn points based on my current metrics, especially formatting. So many of those early text games have truly awful formatting (I even gave one game a zero for how bad it was.)
There's a couple of other minor changes to individual game scores on other metrics that needed it. See if you can spot them all in the updated Tier List.
What this has all resulted in is an overall shift downwards for most games. The D, E and F tiers are now more balanced, with far more games now in the F tier than previously - and they all deserve it. There is a new worst game on the list, War, which now has a score of twelve. It's just awful, and deserves to be at the bottom of the barrel.
Some games have gone up, like Galaxy Game, which is now out of the F tier. The top of the list hasn't changed, the scores have only been re-adjusted. Star Trek is still on top, though Space Race is now second. Hunt the Wumpus fell out of C tier, and into third overall.
I think the list is now more balanced, with better variety of scores, outside of F tier. Getting away from the stock 5 score for visuals has allowed for a better spread, and for games to be more distinct in the list.
Have a scan of the List if you're interested. I just do these scores for fun, mostly. And to have a more empirical means of knowing which games I like more than others. It's like, I could give you a top 10 games of all time list, but it'd probably change every week. Doing this helps me crystallize my thoughts better.
Are there any scores you disagree with? Did I miss something? If so, drop a comment below. Dialoguing is fun, and I'm enjoying seeing more comments trickle through.
I'm aiming to have the Drag article ready by tomorrow. If not, it'll be out on Monday. My focus is entirely elsewhere on weekends, and I don't work on Sundays. I'm going to attempt to have more of a release schedule again, which will ideally be Mondays and Fridays.
Release Date: September, 1973
Platform: Mainframe (BASIC type-in)
Genre: Educational
Developer(s): Howie Franklin
Publisher(s): People's Computer Company
There's one for you, nineteen for me
'Cause I'm the Taxman
Yeah I'm the Taxman...
Revolver is the best Beatles album. Change my mind.
Unfortunately, this game is not about The Beatles. Rather, it's about one of life's inevitabilities: taxes. Except, not really. Taxman is, in fact, an educational puzzle game about numerical factors. Sounds fun, right?
Before getting into the game, let's start with the game's author. This one's a tricky one to figure out. MobyGames has the author listed as a Howie Franklin. Now, I couldn't find much of any information about him online. What to Do After You Hit Return references him as a PCC employee, but other than that, crickets. The only reference I found to him as the author of Taxman comes from a very old PCC alumni website that appeared to be maintained by Bob Albrecht. He has a page listing all the games included in the PCC newsletters over the years, and Taxman is listed there with a comment in parenthesis, which says,
"(by Howie Franklin? Great game!)"
...and that's all the information there is on him. That same site lists all PCC contributors, including Franklin, but his page is basically empty. It's kind of frustrating, seeing as there were a few opportunities to name the author, as Taxman appears in three editions of the PCC newsletter: September '73, November '73, and January '74. The newsletter created a little story surrounding the game centred on two characters, Max and Minnie, who represented different ways to play Taxman throughout the articles in each newsletter.
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| Should five percent appear to small, be thankful I don't take it all. |
An interesting tidbit PCC gives us via What to Do After You Hit Return, is that Franklin wasn't the originator of the idea for Taxman. At the back of that book, it provides the code for all the games, and on Taxman's page, a comment is given stating that the concept for Taxman originated at the Lawrence Hall of Science - a place that's come up a few times before on this blog. Battle and the original form of Bagels originate from there. What to Do also states that the Hall didn't know who the idea came from. So that's just fantastic. I have no certain author, nor a certain originator. History is fun.
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| If you drive a car, I'll tax the street. |
Just to complicate things further, there's the source code from the Sol20 website. This one has two names attached to it: J. Stewart and Dave Skrove. One of these two could also be the original author. This code is dated to January 11, 1974, though, so these my be the two who converted the game from the "Mankato Library," as noted by the game code itself.
Considering the evidence, I'm inclined to go with what Bob Albrecht said on the PCC Alumni site, as his statement is effectively an eyewitness account.
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| If you try to sit, I'll tax your seat. |
With that settled, let's get into the game. As I said at the beginning, Taxman is about mathematical factors. The game does quite a good job of explaining itself, so I'll allow it to do so for me (courtesy of the Archive's "modern" version port):
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| If you get too cold, I'll tax the heat. |
My first thought was to get rid of 1 as soon as possible, with it being a factor of every number. The only real viable choices for this are 2, 3, 5 and 7. 2 and 3 are factors of several other numbers on the list, and 5 is a factor of 10. That leaves 7, being a prime number, as the most logical first choice. It's not the only prime number on the list, but it is the only one that isn't a factor of any other number.
I take 7, the Taxman takes 1. Next move.
This next move took a little bit of thought. Again, wanting to make sure that Mr. Taxman only takes one number. I could've taken 4, and he take 2 - but that would leave 8 all alone for the Taxman to swoop up at the end. 6 would have him take 2 and 3 - but I need to keep 3 for 9. Taking 10 now would mean I lose 2, which I need to keep also. This really only left 9 as the only viable move, as the only number that would be taken was 3. 6 would still have 2, and 8 would still have 4, so it works perfectly.
9 is taken. Taxman gets 3.
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| If you take a walk, I'll tax your feet. |
The game opens up significantly from here, as there remains three pairs of numbers: 6 and 2, 8 and 4, and finally 10 and 5. It's pretty much routine from here, and I win by a significant margin: 40 to 15.
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| Don't ask me what I want it for (Ha-Ha, Mr. Wilson) |
Starting with 11 numbers, things don't change much. Instead of taking 7 first, I take 11. 7 has to be left for the Taxman at the end, as there's no way to remove it after taking 11. The rest of the round plays out exactly the same as a 10-number game. Thinking forward, though, things will get more and more challenging with every prime number that is added.
12 numbers makes the game much more complicated, since it's another number with 2, 3 and 4 as factors. Taking 11 and leaving 7 is still a necessary choice, as is taking 9 and losing 3 to the Taxman. It gets tricky after this. There's no real way to have Mr. Taxman only take one number here. What ends up making the most sense is having him take two of the lowest numbers, which at this point are 2 and 4. Therefore, 8 becomes the best next choice. It removes 2 and 4, while leaving 6 as a factor of 12, alongside 10 and 5. Doing this results in a 50-28 win.
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| If you don't want to pay some more (Ha-Ha, Mr. Heath) |
13 numbers actually doesn't change much. I have to take 13 instead of 11, which leaves both it and 7 for the Taxman at the end. The strategy remains the same as the 12-number game, for a 52-39 win.
14 numbers is actually easier since there's now a way to get rid of the 7. The overall strategy doesn't change from 13 or 12 number games, I can now just take 14 at the end to have a bigger winning margin of 66-39.
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| Now my advice for those who die... |
15 numbers is the last round I tried for this blog. Can't ruin all the fun if you want to try this at home. 15 is the next major difficulty spike, as it adds another number with 3 and 5 as factors, which takes away 9 and 10's monopoly on 3 and 5, respectively. What I decided was the best option was to leave the 9 for Taxman, and have 3 be taken by 15. This results in a win of 72-48.
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| Declare the pennies on your eyes. |
For those who are curious, I did have a look at what the largest game that can be played in Taxman. Turns out to be 50 numbers. This is quite a scary proposition, but I gave it a go, and it is possible to beat. I'll leave it to you, reader, to discover how.
For now, we'll have a look at how Taxman rates. Is it as good as its Beatles' namesake, or is it a tax fraud?
Get your driving helmets ready for the next game - we're going out to the drag strip. You can drive my car, and yes, I'm gonna be a star.
[P.S. As a small nitpick, PCC gets the date for "Taxman" the song wrong. It's a 1966 track, not 1967. Sorry, my inner music snob just had to get that out before I finish here.]
And you're working for no one but me...
Hi all, just a brief update here.
I had an idea while at work at couple of days ago, that it might be nice to provide a page that includes some of the resources I use on the blog. That way, you all could see for yourself what my sources are, and investigate them for yourself if you're inclined to do so.
And so, I have created a new Recommended Resources page, which you can find on the sidebar under the "Important Pages" heading. This resource page includes books and databases I've relied heavily upon in my research, along with links to some free (and legal) game collections.
Also included at the end are some assorted media resources that I've found helpful or interesting. This includes interviews, podcasts, documentaries and assorted video essays on a variety of topics.
This will be an expanding list, so check back often to see if there's anything new!
[Also, what do you think of the new colours and logo? I figured it was time to make the place look slightly more professional. Emphasis on the word "slightly." If you have thoughts, let me know in the comments.]
Release Date: September, 1973
Platform: Mainframe (BASIC type-in)
Genre: Puzzle
Developer(s): Bob Albrecht, Kent T. Kehrberg
Publisher(s): People's Computer Company
Here we have yet another game in the Mugwump family. This one is probably the strangest of the bunch in terms of its gameplay also, with a focus on circles instead of cartography.
Snark is, like its two older brothers, written by Bob Albrecht of People's Computer Company. Additional assistance was provided by Kent T. Kehrberg to convert the game into CDC BASIC. Kehrberg adapted a few other games into different forms of BASIC, and appeared to work for the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC). If you don't already know MECC, believe me - you will soon enough.
Snark was never included in an edition of PCC's newsletter, instead first appearing in 1974's PCC Games booklet. I don't know where MobyGames gets its September '73 release date from, as the source code doesn't provide any dates, nor is there any other evidence I could find to support this date.
An official write-up for Snark comes in PCC's What to Do After You Hit Return book from 1975. It doesn't really give out much information on the game, but it does inform us that the titular Snark originated from Lewis Carroll's poem The Hunting of the Snark. I'd never heard of this particular work before; Wikipedia describes its genre as "literary nonsense," so I assume it's about as weird as you'd expect, being a Lewis Carroll work.
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| Albrecht took inspiration from the poem for the game explanation. |
Anyway, I digress. Snark's page also includes something of an explanation of how the game works. I say "something" because it's not exactly a satisfactory explanation. It took me a long time of staring with a confused look to understand it. In fact, it only clicked while writing this very paragraph. I'd already played, recorded and scored the game at this time, so I went back to try again now that it made sense to me.
Guesses in this game are almost like radar pulses - you select a spot on the grid to guess, which becomes the centre of the circle, or radar pulse, if we continue with the radar analogy. You then select the size of the circle's radius, and the game will tell you if the Snark in outside, inside, or "on" the circle. The number selected for the radius applies to all sides of the circle, i.e. a radius of 2 will mean that the circle goes out 2 points in all directions. At this point, I have no idea what the difference between "inside" and "on" is. I think "on" might mean that the Snark is on the circumference of the circle, it's not made explicitly clear, but that would make sense to me. [Spoiler: it makes sense down the page.]
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| Here's how the game tries to explain itself. |
This lack of clarity in the rules of the game led me to have a rather torrid time in my first playthrough. I started with a strategy of selecting equidistant points on the grid as my starting guesses (2,2 -> 7,2 -> 2,7 -> 7,7) to make sure I covered most of the grid. I got a hit one 2,7, and must have checked and double-checked every point around it, becoming quite frustrated by the end. The point I needed was 4,9 - which took 47 guesses.
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| End my suffering. Please. |
This is a good example of how a poorly explained game can negatively impact perception of a game. I felt lost, confused, and unsure of how the game worked. Once I understood how the game was supposed to work, it became a whole lot easier, and I could guess where the Snark was in under 15 guesses.
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| An example of how it goes when I know what I'm doing. |
Hopefully that makes more sense than the book's explanation. Hopefully my scores also make sense.
Next, we sing The Beatles.
Don't forget - if you enjoy my blog, be sure to leave a comment and follow so you don't miss any updates!
Release Date: August, 1973
Platform: Mainframe (BASIC type-in)
Genre: Puzzle
Developer(s): David "Dave of the Caves" Kaufman
Publisher(s): People's Computer Company
While he's called "Dave of the Caves," the Caves games aren't the only games Dave Kaufman produced for People's Computer Company during his tenure with them. Here, we have a strange little puzzle game, Button, Button, Who's Got the Button? I'm going to call it Button for the majority of the article for brevity's sake.
Some corrections need to be made on the release date provided by MobyGames. It says it was released in September '73, but the game's own source code, provided in PCC Games, lists August '73 as the date instead. Button doesn't appear in the September '73 issue of the PCC newsletter, so I'm content to stick with what the source code says. As a rule, I go with the earliest date I find, unless there's compelling evidence to the contrary.
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| Evidence of Button's August 1973 date, courtesy again of PCC Games (1974.) |
There's only a couple of rules that mix things up a little. If your guess is the neighbour of the person who has the button, they will pass off the button to someone else. If you then guess the previous holder of the button, then the person who had the button that turn will pass it off. So there's a little bit of logic in determining who likely has the button in those instances. You could also just guess the person outright at random. It happens more often than you'd think. One in seven chance.
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| The rules. |
Or, only on very special occasions, the button will just disappear. I had this happen to me once, oddly when I was playing the modern version of the Archive port. Yes - I did play the modern version, purely so I could read all of the instructions. I started to go mad when this occurred, questioning people that didn't exist within the game, seeing as the people who were there all said they didn't have the button.
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| Colour and madness. Question everything. |
I also had a different glitch occur in the classic version of the game. Sometimes, seemingly at random, the game would decide that it didn't like the current round I was playing and decided to give me a new one instead. Normally you'd have to type in a zero to get this to happen, but sometimes the game did it on its own.
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| Apparently the game didn't like what I was doing in this round. |
It's oddly fun to talk about bugs in these games. I suppose it might be because there's been so few that when one (or two, in this case) does appear, it's like a special event to commemorate. It also provides opportunities for jokes, which I will always gladly take.
I've been experimenting with my work process somewhat, which resulted in me playing this a lot more than I probably needed to. As a result, I'm fairly content with the scores I've given Button. There's not much else to say about the game, so let's get into it.
We're done with Dave of the Caves' contributions for a little while now. He'll be back later on. Next up, we're revisiting the Mugwump game format with Snark.
Don't forget - if you enjoy my blog, be sure to leave a comment and follow so you don't miss any updates!
Unfortunately, the Caves series has turned into something of an anti-climax. If you couldn't tell already, this is going to be another gaiden article, and a very short one at that. There's still an amount of interesting tidbits to discuss, as both Caves2 and Caves3 are innovative programs in their own rights.
It's a good time to talk about these now for a few reasons. One is that I'm experimenting with my work process and played ahead a few games. I got to these two, and saw that, in their source code, they're listed by Dave Kaufman as having been written in June of 1973. They were still released in September '73 by People's Computer Company, as that was the next newsletter published after Caves 2 and 3 were completed.
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| PCC Newsletter, September 1973. |
Another reason is that, as it turns out, these "sequels" developed by Dave of the Caves are not new games. Rather, they are both, in essence, scenario editors for Lost in the Caves. Yes, that's right - now you too can make a cave system, all for the purposes of causing grievous mental confusion to a person or persons of your own choosing! (You can bet someone would've tried to make a "kaizo" cave back in the day. That's what game making programs are for, right?)
I believe that this is the first instance of a scenario editor-type program ever made for a game - and we get two for the price of one!
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| Caves2's introduction. |
The only difference between the two is that Caves2 does not allow for making loops in the cave system, such as making a loop of cavern #12 -> #13 -> #19 --> #12 (this is the example given in Caves3's instructions.) Caves2 can fit up to 128 caverns; I assume the same for Caves3, but no articles on it confirm that.
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| Caves3's introduction. |
While I find it disappointing that these aren't sequel games, I love the fact that Dave of the Caves thought it was a good idea to make these programs. He was, I think, trying to encourage people to get into a simple form of making their own games, without the need to learn BASIC progamming. I'm taken back to my youth when I used to mess around for hours in Age of Empires' scenario editor and make the most absurd, blow-everything-up types of maps. Those were fun times...
Release Date: May, 1973
Platform: Mainframe (BASIC type-in)
Genre: Puzzle
Developer(s): David "Dave of the Caves" Kaufman
Publisher(s): People's Computer Company
Now we can get back on track slightly. We're back to 1973, with the game that triggered the reshuffle in the first place.
I'll be breaking formula slightly and will be talking about the release date first, because that's where all the shenanigans started. MobyGames has our topic today, Lost in the Caves, listed as a September '73 release, along with author David Kaufman's other 1973 games. For this game and another game, this date can be shown to be incorrect. In Lost in the Caves' instance, the People's Computer Company Games booklet from 1974 lists the earliest appearance in a newsletter for every game included - and Lost in the Caves' (called Caves1 there) first appearance is listed as the May 1973 newsletter.
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| Figure 1: PCC Games, 1974. |
I went over to that particular edition to confirm, and it indeed is the case.
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| Figure 2: Corroborating evidence, PCC newsletter, May 1973. |
Doubling back to PCC Games, it has a number of other Caves games, including Caves4 and Trees, which were not available at the time of publishing, however may also be unreleased games. Trees appeared to be a game-making program, allowing the user to make their own Caves game (there is a Tree Subroutines program in PCC Games which could be said Trees program.) There are other programs also listed that allow for the making of one's own Caves game. I believe this is the first instance of game-making software.
That now brings us to the programmer behind this family of innovative games and software, David "Dave of the Caves" Kaufman. He was a regular contributor at People's Computer Company, most notable for his contribution to the writing of PCC's seminal 1975 book What to Do After You Hit Return. That book is kind of like PCC's equivalent of David Ahl's BASIC Computer Games, and an expanded version of the PCC Games booklet for 1974. It features many of PCC's BASIC type-in programs featured in their newsletter from 1972 - 1975. I also discovered that he wrote the game I just covered, Beyond Bagels, from the May '74 edition of the PCC newsletter. Apparently, he was also planning on writing a book about the Caves series. It seems to have never eventuated, or perhaps it morphed into What to Do After You Hit Return.
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| Kaufman's letter is bottom-middle. |
Despite Kaufman's significant contributions to PCC, and early video games as a whole, there's not much information about who he was that I can find. Doing a simple Google search primarily gives results for the actor David Kaufman. I also found a university professor from Canada who seemed to write a lot about game theory. No tangible leads for Dave of the Caves, however. It's honestly quite bizarre to me how he seemed to have just... disappeared. Plenty of people have written about his games, but no one actually seems to know who he is. I even broke one of my own unwritten rules, enlisting the services of AI to hunt down any information on him, but even ChatGPT doesn't know anything else about him. It just tells me what I already knew.
Lost in the Caves itself is well-preserved once again on the Internet Archive, along with its brethren in the "modern or classic" DOSBox format. You know what mode I chose.
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| Flavour text! |
We get a story synopsis to start out the game's introduction. Yeah, that's right, this game has a story. You play as an explorer, lost in the "famous Duzzledorf caves." I've never heard of them, so they can't be that famous. Regardless, you're out of food and beginning to starve. You need to find the way out. Too bad failing to escape in time isn't implemented in the game. Would've been a great piece of gameplay-story integration, and it could've been done, based on what I've seen earlier games do with loss conditions. It ends up being a solid story premise, but lack of gameplay execution is disappointing.
The way the network of caves functions in the Caves series is on what Kaufman called a "tree" system. Each cave that doesn't lead to a dead end splits off into three options - at least one of them will lead to another branch of the cave system. Sometimes multiple branches lead to dead ends, requiring backtracking multiple rooms to try again. Kaufman encourages making maps to track your progress. I'd consider this the first true instance of encouraging a now-lost art of video games - map making. Yes, Mugwump encouraged a form of it, but that was for educational purposes and doesn't work the same way.
My first expedition in the caves was a short affair. There was only 13 caverns, and it took less than a minute to find my way out. How did we get lost in there for days, again? The escape is met with the celebration of sun and fresh air... and the media. Almost makes me want to run back into the cave.
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| Somehow, the paparazzi always show up. |
Upon winning, the game asks if you'd like to try again with a more difficult cave layout. Another game with difficulty options. Except, unlike Slalom, these actually do something. I fumbled and typed "YES" instead of "1" like the game asks, and so I got an equivalent cave layout instead of a harder one. To be honest, I actually did this a couple of times before I got the memo. Feel free to laugh at my expense here.
Eventually, I got into more challenging and complex cave systems. These more complex cave systems can have close to forty caverns in them, with branches that lead to multiple other branches that all lead to dead ends. Making maps becomes very important for these. I didn't do this because I'm stubborn, and so I got stuck in one of these for a while, thinking I'd gotten softlocked in an unwinnable cave. I found my way out of this one after a minute or two of head-scratching and triple-checking every single cavern I'd explored. If you could starve in-game, I would have in this cave.
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| Seemingly endless dead ends that should've resulted in a dead explorer. |
Fortunately, the other cave I did at this (which turns out to be the hardest difficulty) was far less painful to navigate. Still didn't make a map. I will learn, trust me. There are games coming where making a map is a near necessity.
Those reporters that met me as I escaped the cave asked me what I thought about the game. Here's what I told them.
Lost in the Caves isn't so much a good game, but a solid foundation for future text-based adventures to build upon. I think that's why I sound like I'm being so harsh towards it. Alongside Hunt the Wumpus, there's so much untapped potential to create something truly great from what these games laid out. I truly look forward to seeing what future games do with this foundation.
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