https://www.atariarchive.org/blog/adventure-march-1980/
Of all the original games Atari put out for the VCS, Adventure may be the one that most people are familiar with today. Warren Robinett's third and final VCS game – though seemingly the second to actually be released – serves as a counterweight to the arcade action of its March 1980 brethren Space Invaders by providing a nearly unique experience on a home console in its day.
[...] Since the VCS isn't designed for full text adventure gameplay, Robinett worked on translating Colossal Cave Adventure's core idea to a graphical interface using the limited capabilities of the system. The VCS's "ball" sprite became the player character.The two high resolution sprites typically used for player objects became the objects located throughout the world, and the system's low-resolution background graphics would be used for screen room designs.
[...] The duck-like dragons themselves deserve a special mention as being one of the first examples of computer opponents exhibiting unique personality traits and goals. Yorgle, the yellow dragon, primarily guards the chalice, but will wander the game world hunting you or assisting his dragon pals provided the golden key is not nearby, as he's terrified of it. Grundle, the green dragon, guards three vital objects: the magnet, the bridge and the black key, and as such will generally stick around wherever one of those is currently located.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 06, @06:58PM (5 children)
Never heard of it.
(Score: 3, Funny) by DannyB on Tuesday May 06, @09:02PM (2 children)
Adventure. An interactive game. Text only at the console. It is really old. Definitely 1980 or earlier. I first encountered it on a new super minicomputer that my college acquired in my freshman semester. I didn't know how to play it. At first I was really stuck at the XYZZY part. But I got past that.
The only way to stop a bad guy with a can opener is a good guy with a can opener.
(Score: 2) by Undefined on Tuesday May 06, @09:06PM (1 child)
I have the original text Adventure still working on an 8-bit CPU emulator. Played it through (again) about a year ago. That was very rewarding.
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(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday May 08, @02:29PM
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
The only way to stop a bad guy with a can opener is a good guy with a can opener.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by owl on Tuesday May 06, @10:10PM (1 child)
You must not have been the right age to have had an Atari VCS/2600 [wikipedia.org]
Adventure [wikipedia.org] was one of the classics of the Atari VCS/2600.
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Wednesday May 07, @01:34PM
I was not of the right age to encounter an Atari VCS (until my wife bought be a 2600jr a few Christmases ago).
My first exposure to the content of Adventure was through the works of the Brothers Chaps on homstarrunner.com. The yellow dragon shows up in a few videos, and on hovering over the 'email' link on one of the main pages [homestarrunner.com].
When I got an Adventure cartridge and powered it up, on encountering the dragon my immediate response was: "SOMEONE GET THIS FREAKING DUCK AWAY FROM ME!!!"
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday May 06, @10:32PM
We had an Atari 2600, but not Adventure. Never played it. I did play Pitfall and Pitfall II on it. In the contest between consoles and home computers, for me the home computer won handily. I used a TRS-80, Apple II, and Commodore 64. The TRS-80 didn't have color and I didn't have a floppy drive for it, so I preferred the Atari 2600 to that. But the other 2 were way better than a cruddy, locked down console. Yeah, the Atari certainly had more colors and better sound than the Apple II, but its resolution was strange. Seemed able to draw small pixels, but a lot of the games, Adventure among them, nevertheless used big blocky graphics, and I always wondered why. Extremely limited memory was the reason. The Commodore 64 graphics and sound blew all the others away, and it would have replaced the Apple as my favorite computer if only its disk drive had not been so agonizingly slow.
On the Apple II I played Zork I, II, and III, Scott Adams' Adventureland, Beneath Apple Manor, the early Ultima games, Questron, the Stuart Smith adventures Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves and Return of Heracles, Sword of Kadash, Bard's Tale I, II, and III, and Wizardry II. Yes, there were ports of Colossal Cave to the Apple II, but I never played those either. Colossal Cave inspired a lot of games, some more closely mimicking it than others. I have heard Zork is one of the closest mimics.
The ending of Beneath Apple Manor is beautiful, an emphatic statement of opinion that matches the opinion of many, including me, that the computer is better than the console. It would not be possible to implement that on the Atari 2600.