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Scrybe · 09-06-2004, 08:00 PM

<delurk>
Been lurking on this forum for ages, but this thread finally made me come out of hiding.

My first adventure game was Zork II on the C64, many many moons ago, but I never finished it, due to the less than ideal circumstances I was playing it under back then. As a teenager with hardly any money, I didn't actually own a computer at the time. But being somewhat game-obsessed, some afternoons after school I'd ride to the local shopping mall and check out K-Mart's home electronics department, as they usually had a C64 and a Vic-20 set up, along with the ever-present Atari VCS. Normally the computers would just be running BASIC, but occasionally there would be a game running on one or the other of them, which I'd play rather than blowing whatever small amount of money I had on the Defender machine elsewhere in the mall.

But one magic afternoon, all that changed. The C64 had sprouted a 1541 disk drive, safely locked away in a clear perspex case underneath the monitor where no-one could touch it, but one of the shop staff had loaded a game that looked at first glance like a page full of writing...

It was Zork II, and I was immediately hooked. I began to visit the shop every day religiously, just to explore that amazing world. Because I had no access to the disk drive, there was no way to save my game, so to progress I had to restart from the beginning every day, retrace my steps from memory, then continue from there... Even now I'm sure I could play through the first third or so of the game from memory!

Sadly, one day the C64 was no longer running the game, and that was the end of that. It was probably a good two years later before I actually had a C64 myself (after a brief period of ZX Spectrum ownership, where the first adventure I actually owned and finished was 'The Hobbit'), but the adventure game bug had well and truly bitten by then, and although for some reason I never got Zork II for it (I don't remember it being in the shops) I did have Zork I and The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, both of which took me literally years to complete, in that pre-internet/pre-walkthrough era.

Okay, that's enough from me for a first post. Subsequent ones hopefully won't be quite so long and boring!

Cheers,
Scrybe

PS First graphic adventure was Labyrinth, on the C64 as well. I really must finish that one of these days...

09-06-2004, 08:00 PM	#64
Scrybe Junior Member Join Date: Aug 2004 Location: Melbourne, Australia Posts: 1	<delurk> Been lurking on this forum for ages, but this thread finally made me come out of hiding. My first adventure game was Zork II on the C64, many many moons ago, but I never finished it, due to the less than ideal circumstances I was playing it under back then. As a teenager with hardly any money, I didn't actually own a computer at the time. But being somewhat game-obsessed, some afternoons after school I'd ride to the local shopping mall and check out K-Mart's home electronics department, as they usually had a C64 and a Vic-20 set up, along with the ever-present Atari VCS. Normally the computers would just be running BASIC, but occasionally there would be a game running on one or the other of them, which I'd play rather than blowing whatever small amount of money I had on the Defender machine elsewhere in the mall. But one magic afternoon, all that changed. The C64 had sprouted a 1541 disk drive, safely locked away in a clear perspex case underneath the monitor where no-one could touch it, but one of the shop staff had loaded a game that looked at first glance like a page full of writing... It was Zork II, and I was immediately hooked. I began to visit the shop every day religiously, just to explore that amazing world. Because I had no access to the disk drive, there was no way to save my game, so to progress I had to restart from the beginning every day, retrace my steps from memory, then continue from there... Even now I'm sure I could play through the first third or so of the game from memory! Sadly, one day the C64 was no longer running the game, and that was the end of that. It was probably a good two years later before I actually had a C64 myself (after a brief period of ZX Spectrum ownership, where the first adventure I actually owned and finished was 'The Hobbit'), but the adventure game bug had well and truly bitten by then, and although for some reason I never got Zork II for it (I don't remember it being in the shops) I did have Zork I and The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, both of which took me literally years to complete, in that pre-internet/pre-walkthrough era. Okay, that's enough from me for a first post. Subsequent ones hopefully won't be quite so long and boring! Cheers, Scrybe PS First graphic adventure was Labyrinth, on the C64 as well. I really must finish that one of these days...