Anybody else fondly remember the earlier Adventure Construction Set from the 1980s? It was similar, though more crude, software but for creating tile based adventure games. I remember breathlessly waiting for it to arrive in the mail one summer when I was a young teen, and then my brother and I spending countless hours creating games for each other to play.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventure_Construction_Set

Yes! Until I saw the box cover illustration, I had totally forgotten that a high-school friend of mine and I worked months to build a Gauntlet clone on our 64K Apple ][+ machines due to the money it was costing us to play it at local game store/nerd magnet, "Dragon's Lair".

I was so excited bringing that box/album cover home from the store. I read the manual through just imagining the games I’d make. When I got home, I put the disk in, and… learned what “minimum system requirements” were, as it wouldn’t run on my PCjr.

There was also _Forgotten Realms: Unlimited Adventures_:

https://www.gogdb.org/product/1432650732

which I greatly enjoyed, and my NWN character, even got a cameo in one fan-made adventure.....

There was also STAC for the Atari ST - absolutely loved it. Unfortunately my artistic skills were not up to making anything good.

https://www.ifwiki.org/STAC

Also Eamon for Apple ][, I played with that a lot! And wrote my own in FORTH too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eamon_(video_game)

Good god, 280 Eamon Adventures, last released October 2023, I have a lot of catching up to do:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Eamon_adventures

Same dragon title screen illustration as Odyssey: The Compleat Apventure!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odyssey:_The_Compleat_Apventur...

Also great memories of Richard Garriott's Akalabeth: World of Doom!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akalabeth:_World_of_Doom

An Adventure I wrote in Logo, released on the C64 Terrapin Logo examples floppy, using the Logo REPL as the parser:

https://donhopkins.medium.com/logo-adventure-for-c64-terrapi...

Now I'm creating adventures in Cursor with MOOLLM and working on compiling them to JavaScript to run in the browser, kind of like The Sims meets LambdaMOO meets Cursor:

Adventure MOOLLM Anthropic skill:

https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/tree/main/skills/adventu...

Adventure Compiler design document:

https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/skills/adventu...

Adventure-4 example microworld:

https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/tree/main/examples/adven...

Here's a marathon session playing in Cursor, and making a wish on a monkey's paw for the rest of the monkey:

https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/examples/adven...

Here's an interview where MOOLLM explains itself, then we go on a wild ride with the Irn Bru snowman, with underground embassy intrigue, Columbo style:

https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/examples/adven...

I loved that thing. I don't know how many hours I spent on that. I wish I could my kids interested in anything half as creative.

I seem to remember using one called AGT (adventure game toolkit) that I'd obtained from some sort of mail away floppy shareware service or something. It's wild to think of how much has changed in the last few decades!