Release Date: July 1973
Platform: Mainframe (BASIC type-in)
Genre: Puzzle
Developer(s): Kenneth Aupperle, David H. Ahl
Publisher(s): Digital Equipment Corporation
Out of the gate, this is a somewhat interesting title, as I originally had Game of Hangman slated as a 1970 game. I had mistaken it for another Hangman game on account of the online information being somewhat unclear in distinguishing between the two games. So this article's been hanging in limbo for something like a year, although I've chosen to completely re-write it anyway.
History
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| I don't condone this action, fyi. |
Game of Hangman has a fairly straightforward origin, although there is an oddity to address, which I'll mention two paragraphs down. The game was included in David Ahl's 101 BASIC Computer Games as a game he personally modified from a game written by high school sophomore Kenneth Aupperle. Aupperle was attending Half Hollow Hills High School in Dix Hills, New York at the time, and this is his only known game credit.
Now, here's where I'd normally say that I found no more information on the author. Not today! I was actually able to find a significant amount of information on Kenneth Aupperle - very interesting information, I might add. Kenneth Robert Aupperle (born August 1957) ended up founding a company in 1982, alongside Kenneth Plotkin, called Hauppauge Computer Works. This name immediately rang familiar to me - I recalled many of the YouTubers I watched in my youth referencing their use of Hauppauge TV recording devices to record their game footage. Hauppauge was also heavily involved in computer hardware, satellite products and a software known as WinTV, which allowed for tuning and viewing television on a PC. The company is actually still around today, still selling TV recording devices and TV tuner cards. However, Kenneth Aupperle is not. He died in January 2001, at only 43 years of age.
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| The future's really upping the efficiency of execution, eh? |
The aforementioned oddity of this game comes in when inspecting the game code included in 101 BASIC Games. The book was published originally in 1973, however in the game's crediting of Auppele, it lists him as being part of the "class of '75." Now, I don't know if this is some kind of American school convention that I'm unaware of as an Australian, but on the surface, it strikes as a strange inconsistency. With Aupperle being born in 1957, 1975 would've been his graduation year, so it makes sense to me that the "class of '75" is referring not to the grade he was in at the time of writing Game of Hangman, but rather his future graduation year. American readers may be able to correct my understanding if I'm wrong about that.
The Game
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| Getting straight into it. |
Game of Hangman is very much your typical Hangman game. The game will give you a word, with quite a wide range of length - between 3 and 19 letters long - and you get 10 guesses before you're hanged. This digital version also draws out a stick figure getting hanged on the gallows as you make more and more wrong guesses - another early example of ASCII graphics.
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| The only "lug" here was me. |
David Ahl also encourages adding your own words to the game in his book writeup. You'd add extra words at the bottom of the code where all the other words are stored, but you also would have to adjust the random word selector code at the start of the program. I didn't try this, and was content to stick with the base selection of words.
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| Almost lost the poor guy, there. |
The few rounds I played favoured shorter words, which I often find more challenging to guess than longer words. Less letters in a word means more probability of guessing wrong. Some of the shorter words are more uncommonly used ones, too, like "lug," which I failed to guess. I only ever hear that word used as an insult in films, or directed towards large pets. I did almost fail to guess "kangaroo," much to my shame as an Aussie. We typically call them "roos" out here, because - fun fact - we Aussies love shortening words wherever possible.
I don't think there's much need to say anything more. You know Hangman, but you don't know the scores. Yet.
Scores
Time Played: 25 minutes
Difficulty: 3/10 (Easy)
Hangman is always kind of a funny one for me, as often the shorter words end up being the most difficult to figure out. Less total letters means more probability of guessing wrong. There's some luck to it all, but there's also strategy in knowing what the most common letters in the English alphabet are, and various spelling conventions.
Gameplay: 2/20
The selection of words has a good amount of variety to it, in terms of the types of words and the lengths of the words, which range from between 3 - 19 letters long. But... it's also Hangman, already one of the simplest games out there, and this version of it does only the basics.
Controls: 5/10
It's what you'd expect for a Hangman game - type letters and words, no frills.
Visual: 2/10
It gets a point for the hangman drawing - it's quite well done.
Functionality: 5/5
I didn't run into any issues, so free points here.
Accessibility: 4/5
Hangman is one of those games that's friendly to almost all ages. This done does get pretty college-brained with some of the word choices, but it's still very accessible for a text-based game - graphical bits always help.
Fun Factor: 2/20
Some of the words are silly, which is good for a chuckle. But, again, it's Hangman. I enjoy it on some primitive level, but it's not exactly giving me a deep and intricate gameplay experience.
Overall: 20/70 | 28.57% | E-tier
Game of Hangman earns a score of 20, which, despite being an E-tier score, makes it one of the better games I've played in recent times. How sad. On the bright side, there are some more interesting games coming up, among some certain F-tier placers.
A Short Update
In case you didn't see my update on the direction of the blog, with my return is coming some changes in content, and an increase in frequency of posting. Every time a game like this - based on a real-world game - crops up, I'll be following the game article with a brief history of the real game. These "Brief History" articles will always release on the following Tuesday.
I will also be, for the foreseeable future, alternating between a new game and a revisit. I've been wanting to revisit my early articles for a while, as there's quite a lot I missed in my early days. My breakthrough with PDP-10 emulation means I can play most of the BASIC games I originally skipped over, too, so those will also come up in the revisits of past years.
With that, next week we'll begin the revisits, by starting at the very beginning of video game history, and a game I never actually bothered to cover way back when: the Cathode-Ray Tube Amusement Device. Try saying that 5 times fast.
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