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.)