Lovely to hear this about Infocom and SOL. The former was my obsession throughout the mid-late 80s on my Atari 800XL, and then the latter for the next few years after getting a 386SX in '89.

I recall sending a letter to them asking them for information on how they compressed their images for their hi-res adventure games. While they replied, they said it was a trade secret. I was kind of bummed. But being a 12 year old kid who barely understood the 6502, it probably would have gone over my head.

Nice.

When I was around six years old, my older brothers convinced me computer games were written in paragraph form. I wrote a lot of games! Asteroids went something like this, "You fly around in a ship that is a triangle. When you shoot asteroids they break up into smaller asteroids."

My brothers got a lot of laughs out of those "programs".

Fast-forward 45 years and whose laughing now?! :)

I iterated on adventure games from junior high into high school, starting with a TRS-80 Model III.

I created parser recursion in BASIC (without a stack or a then non-existent GOSUB), using a string as the stack, including a character as a return destination (i.e. a flag for conditional GOTOs).

I was so proud of my parser!

A wrote many great unfinished games. I was more interested in better coding than completion, but the games still had a lot of color.

One Easter egg was if you typed “sh*t” the response was: “YOU HAVE DROPPED THE DUNG”.” You could do that anywhere, so a great way to detect you had walked in a circle in a maze or forest.

Later I used strings as a heap to define very simple 3D vector geometry.

(In early MATLAB, I prototyped some code with tree data structures implemented with an array, before they introduced their structures. The latter code shipped.)

Wrote a mini adventure game in BASIC for the ZX-81. Since it only had 1K of RAM, each room in the game had to be a separate program (max around 25 lines of code or so), and at the end of the room, depending on what actions you took, it asked you to wind the cassette tape to a specific location to load a new room. When I could finally afford the 16K RAM pack, I rewrote it as a single application. Couldn't believe how nice it was to have that much memory.

Writing a terrible "verb object" parser in BASIC was certainly a rite of passage for many of us. I recall making more than one. I also recall my best one having rudimentary "verb object preposition subject" support, but that being about my limit at the time in BASIC.

But also I had access to TADS and early Inform (at home) and still wound up building a couple in BASIC (because school computer labs would have that available).