7 ms·

The Plot of the Phantom, a text adventure that took 40 years to finish

191 points by SeenNotHeard 1y ago

bravesoul2 1y ago
Had a quick play and it's fun, quirky, well written. I might just get into this. Damn rat!
- apples_oranges 1y ago
  I wonder what "quick play" means in 2025 with our short attention spans
  - gbraad 1y ago
    ... I thought he took 40 years to finish playing it. :-D
  - bravesoul2 1y ago
    30 seconds. Mainly because on the phone entering a lot of text is tedious.
noisy_boy 1y ago
From a serial procrastinator, kudos and best of luck!
BryanLegend 1y ago
Did George RR Martin write it?
- jl6 1y ago
  No, it’s finished.
ThinkingGuy 1y ago
I was there in the 1980s; writing your own Infocom-style text adventure games was a common project among my peers. There are probably lots of unfinished (or even finished-but-unshared) games out there on old floppy disks in closets. I have a couple of my own, now archived on my home server.
- frost_knight 1y ago
  Willing to share them?
  - ThinkingGuy 1y ago
    I would be, if they weren't so embarrassingly bad!
- kevindamm 1y ago
  I also have a few of those from the 80s but only as notes written on sheets of paper (including many pages of hand-written BASIC and sometimes in various shorthands) because my Atari 800 did not have a cassette drive peripheral with which to save them. They were fun when they ran for 15-20 minutes, even after keying them in for hours.
vunderba 1y ago
Nice job. I think it might be worth adding a few more verb synonyms to make the parser a little bit less strict - what's a few more years of development. :) Like many other devs I also dipped my feet in the world of interactive fiction. As a kid I was just learning about concepts such as inheritance / OOP / etc. so I went a bit overboard on the ontology. I remember pretty early on making a rather large mistake in that regard when a friend who was beta-testing the game for me at the time typed in commands like "get key", "get sword", "get ye flask", and then "get Aldwin" to which the game merrily replied "OK" and promptly stuffed an entire human being into the player's inventory.
- paulgerhardt 1y ago
  Heh. I remember similarly spending a few hours inside LambdaMOO. Successfully managed to clone myself, put myself in my clone’s pocket, and then put my clone in my own pocket and kind of broke room reversal. It was only later I discovered this was an intentional mechanic/bug that some designers that used to create very, very difficult puzzles. Weird things happen when you give your MOO players a REPL in LISP land.
  - amiga386 1y ago
    I once wrote an (Amylaar LPC) enemy who, if you attacked him and he was near death, would summon two comrades to fight for him. Unfortunately, they're immediately hostile so you start attacking them too, and _they_ get near death and summon two comrades each, and so on. It turns into a Sorcerer's Apprentice scenario very quickly. I managed to bring the MUD to a halt. An archwizard (not Yen Sid) had to instakill the enemies to avoid hitting their "near death" condition and creating more of them.
- drewolbrich 1y ago
  I remember writing one of these and typing "put bag in bag" and then being confused why the bag disappeared from the world.
  - IggleSniggle 1y ago
janeway 1y ago
Wow, already stumbled into some good humour. Well done
alienbaby 1y ago
I spent a bit of time using PAWS on an amstrad pcw to pen my own text adventure masterpiece. It's probably still down there packed up in the cellar .... Maybe I should dig it out again.
- anthk 1y ago
  Check NGPaws and such to port them to modern interpreters :)
Nevermark 1y ago
As a kid, the first text adventure I encountered with "The Cave" a text-choice game created by another student in the same town I lived. Our common teacher had created a "Computer Club" newsletter, to share programs between schools. Then at a junior college I encountered Adventure, Zork (the full version), Mystery Mansion, and Warp on an HP 3000/terminal mini-computer system. I began writing text adventures myself, bigger and bigger, and with higher and higher ambitions in terms of complexity, story and world scope, parsing. My "Command English" parser was an incredibly versatile subset of English. At home I had an IBM Jr (Hey, I loved it!), whose BASIC didn't have GOSUB, so I invented a stack for the parser using strings. (Used strings as a heap in another program to create a very slow 3D vector graphics program.) In high school I wrote this massive text adventure called Wanderer. I was so proud of it, until the day I went to save it on my floppy disk, at which time it wrote all over the previous version only to abort because it was to big for the disk. No pre-write size check! :( That was the last one I wrote. But by pushing every text adventure to new levels of capability, over and over, I learned a lot about programming, and developed a habit of innovating in program styles, and domain languages, to match problems. I wish I had the source for all those programs, but these were the days of many incompatible computers, and storage media that decayed quickly. --- I would love a Mac version of those four text adventures mentioned above. Mystery Mansion seems to have become particularly forgotten. --- "The Plot of the Phantom" makes me so happy! Thank you Scott Andrew!!! (Completely random, but reading the opening scene, it struck me how perverse it would be to get deeply into the game and find out I was in the text adventure equivalent of "Deliverance"! That would almost be art, lol. Like novels, text adventures are a medium that naturally supports much greater freedom, than visual mediums.)
- blacksmith_tb 1y ago
  I know Adventure exists via homebrew on the Mac via the open-adventure package. There are a bunch of Z-machine options for Zork.
- spauldo 1y ago
  I had the same thing happen - lost my text adventure because it grew too large. That spurred me to figure out a better way of writing text adventures. I thought my solution of using a single parser and parallel array for game data was pretty innovative. I was 12 at the time and didn't have access to any magazines that had game source in them, so I didn't know any better.
ninetyninenine 1y ago
LLMs can enhance text adventures. I'm not saying having LLMs narrate the entire situation. I'm saying have the LLM sit between gamestate and the player. The LLM is the UI. Essentially the LLM can see the current game state and possible moves and it's the LLMs job to change the game state and report the current game state to the user (via a well written narrative). That keeps the world consistent and structured, but the LLM adds enough dynamism to keep it flowing well. You can even make the underlying game state complex as well. Like you can have enemy AI's that actually move through the world too (independent of the LLM).
- SeenNotHeard 1y ago
  There have been attempts, the results were not promising: https://intfiction.org/t/first-full-game-available-on-new-llm-parser-new-types-of-puzzles-for-if/75044 https://intfiction.org/t/first-full-game-available-on-new-ll...
  - ninetyninenine 1y ago
    It looks as if the problem for this one was a game design issue. They had the LLM be sarcastic and ignore well known adventure game prompts on purpose. It's an easy fix to make the LLM more obedient and polite. The biggest issue is attempts to hack the LLM, to get at hidden gamestate. But I feel this can be easily remedied by just not providing the LLM with hidden game state.
    - Nevermark 1y ago
      The LLM could use a different session to respond to each command. That would keep its behavior passive and restricted to simply the current state, since it would retain no memory of previous actions.
      - ninetyninenine 1y ago
        Yeah many hacks require multiple prompts. So we have a prompt limit and that makes for a really good textual interface for these old style text based games.
Pet_Ant 1y ago
Tangentially related, I remember reading about an ancient still being developed adventure game. It was from Eastern Europe (former Yugoslavia, I want to say) about being trapped in a prison that had crazy amounts of depth and consequences. One of them being something like picking up a random unused condom on the floor will result in the pregnancy of another character in a later chapter. I've searched for it again and can't find it, and I couldn't have dreamed it up. Anyone know the game?
matthewsinclair 1y ago
This is amazing. Replace “Atari 800” with “TI 99/4a” (and the fact that he eventually finished the game) and you have the story of my early life as a programmer! Well done for shipping. That’s the hardest thing of all to do!
scoot 1y ago
"That's not a verb I recognise." (So. Many. Times!) Sorry, but that isn't a verb recognition problem, it's a comprehension problem. I agree with the downvoted poster that LLM integration would significantly improve the end user experience. However the LLM should not be arbiter of game state (as they suggested), but simply the translator that ensures that the players instructions are understood by the game.
scoot 1y ago
I'm imagining the application of text adventures specifically designed for second language learning. Quite the possibilities!
amiga386 1y ago
You could do this too! If you don't feel you have the coding chops for it, read Usbourne's WRITE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE PROGRAMS FOR YOUR MICROCOMPUTER and you'll learn all the secrets of adventure game programmers! https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bxv0SsvibDMTYkFJbUswOHFQclE/view?resourcekey=0-ffScR4l9gOJrDiFw5Kb5fg https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bxv0SsvibDMTYkFJbUswOHFQclE... [PDF]
adamdiy 1y ago
ready.
kqr 1y ago
I took an hour or so out of my day to finish this game and review it on ifdb.org. It was a very pleasant experience, barring the large amount of unimplemented scenery. I would have hoped for a slightly more vivid world and not just a backdrop for puzzles! Thanks for sharing. Very intriguing collaboration between child-author and adult-author.

191 points by SeenNotHeard 1y ago

bravesoul2 1y ago

Had a quick play and it's fun, quirky, well written. I might just get into this. Damn rat!

apples_oranges 1y ago
I wonder what "quick play" means in 2025 with our short attention spans
- gbraad 1y ago
  ... I thought he took 40 years to finish playing it. :-D
- bravesoul2 1y ago
  30 seconds. Mainly because on the phone entering a lot of text is tedious.

noisy_boy 1y ago

From a serial procrastinator, kudos and best of luck!

BryanLegend 1y ago

Did George RR Martin write it?

jl6 1y ago
No, it’s finished.

ThinkingGuy 1y ago

I was there in the 1980s; writing your own Infocom-style text adventure games was a common project among my peers. There are probably lots of unfinished (or even finished-but-unshared) games out there on old floppy disks in closets. I have a couple of my own, now archived on my home server.

frost_knight 1y ago
Willing to share them?
- ThinkingGuy 1y ago
  I would be, if they weren't so embarrassingly bad!
kevindamm 1y ago
I also have a few of those from the 80s but only as notes written on sheets of paper (including many pages of hand-written BASIC and sometimes in various shorthands) because my Atari 800 did not have a cassette drive peripheral with which to save them. They were fun when they ran for 15-20 minutes, even after keying them in for hours.

vunderba 1y ago

Nice job. I think it might be worth adding a few more verb synonyms to make the parser a little bit less strict - what's a few more years of development. :) Like many other devs I also dipped my feet in the world of interactive fiction. As a kid I was just learning about concepts such as inheritance / OOP / etc. so I went a bit overboard on the ontology. I remember pretty early on making a rather large mistake in that regard when a friend who was beta-testing the game for me at the time typed in commands like "get key", "get sword", "get ye flask", and then "get Aldwin" to which the game merrily replied "OK" and promptly stuffed an entire human being into the player's inventory.

paulgerhardt 1y ago
Heh. I remember similarly spending a few hours inside LambdaMOO. Successfully managed to clone myself, put myself in my clone’s pocket, and then put my clone in my own pocket and kind of broke room reversal. It was only later I discovered this was an intentional mechanic/bug that some designers that used to create very, very difficult puzzles. Weird things happen when you give your MOO players a REPL in LISP land.
- amiga386 1y ago
  I once wrote an (Amylaar LPC) enemy who, if you attacked him and he was near death, would summon two comrades to fight for him. Unfortunately, they're immediately hostile so you start attacking them too, and _they_ get near death and summon two comrades each, and so on. It turns into a Sorcerer's Apprentice scenario very quickly. I managed to bring the MUD to a halt. An archwizard (not Yen Sid) had to instakill the enemies to avoid hitting their "near death" condition and creating more of them.
drewolbrich 1y ago
I remember writing one of these and typing "put bag in bag" and then being confused why the bag disappeared from the world.
- IggleSniggle 1y ago

janeway 1y ago

Wow, already stumbled into some good humour. Well done

alienbaby 1y ago

I spent a bit of time using PAWS on an amstrad pcw to pen my own text adventure masterpiece. It's probably still down there packed up in the cellar .... Maybe I should dig it out again.

anthk 1y ago
Check NGPaws and such to port them to modern interpreters :)

Nevermark 1y ago

As a kid, the first text adventure I encountered with "The Cave" a text-choice game created by another student in the same town I lived. Our common teacher had created a "Computer Club" newsletter, to share programs between schools. Then at a junior college I encountered Adventure, Zork (the full version), Mystery Mansion, and Warp on an HP 3000/terminal mini-computer system. I began writing text adventures myself, bigger and bigger, and with higher and higher ambitions in terms of complexity, story and world scope, parsing. My "Command English" parser was an incredibly versatile subset of English. At home I had an IBM Jr (Hey, I loved it!), whose BASIC didn't have GOSUB, so I invented a stack for the parser using strings. (Used strings as a heap in another program to create a very slow 3D vector graphics program.) In high school I wrote this massive text adventure called Wanderer. I was so proud of it, until the day I went to save it on my floppy disk, at which time it wrote all over the previous version only to abort because it was to big for the disk. No pre-write size check! :( That was the last one I wrote. But by pushing every text adventure to new levels of capability, over and over, I learned a lot about programming, and developed a habit of innovating in program styles, and domain languages, to match problems. I wish I had the source for all those programs, but these were the days of many incompatible computers, and storage media that decayed quickly. --- I would love a Mac version of those four text adventures mentioned above. Mystery Mansion seems to have become particularly forgotten. --- "The Plot of the Phantom" makes me so happy! Thank you Scott Andrew!!! (Completely random, but reading the opening scene, it struck me how perverse it would be to get deeply into the game and find out I was in the text adventure equivalent of "Deliverance"! That would almost be art, lol. Like novels, text adventures are a medium that naturally supports much greater freedom, than visual mediums.)

blacksmith_tb 1y ago
I know Adventure exists via homebrew on the Mac via the open-adventure package. There are a bunch of Z-machine options for Zork.
spauldo 1y ago
I had the same thing happen - lost my text adventure because it grew too large. That spurred me to figure out a better way of writing text adventures. I thought my solution of using a single parser and parallel array for game data was pretty innovative. I was 12 at the time and didn't have access to any magazines that had game source in them, so I didn't know any better.

ninetyninenine 1y ago

LLMs can enhance text adventures. I'm not saying having LLMs narrate the entire situation. I'm saying have the LLM sit between gamestate and the player. The LLM is the UI. Essentially the LLM can see the current game state and possible moves and it's the LLMs job to change the game state and report the current game state to the user (via a well written narrative). That keeps the world consistent and structured, but the LLM adds enough dynamism to keep it flowing well. You can even make the underlying game state complex as well. Like you can have enemy AI's that actually move through the world too (independent of the LLM).

SeenNotHeard 1y ago
There have been attempts, the results were not promising: https://intfiction.org/t/first-full-game-available-on-new-llm-parser-new-types-of-puzzles-for-if/75044 https://intfiction.org/t/first-full-game-available-on-new-ll...
- ninetyninenine 1y ago
  It looks as if the problem for this one was a game design issue. They had the LLM be sarcastic and ignore well known adventure game prompts on purpose. It's an easy fix to make the LLM more obedient and polite. The biggest issue is attempts to hack the LLM, to get at hidden gamestate. But I feel this can be easily remedied by just not providing the LLM with hidden game state.
  - Nevermark 1y ago
    The LLM could use a different session to respond to each command. That would keep its behavior passive and restricted to simply the current state, since it would retain no memory of previous actions.
    - ninetyninenine 1y ago
      Yeah many hacks require multiple prompts. So we have a prompt limit and that makes for a really good textual interface for these old style text based games.

Pet_Ant 1y ago

Tangentially related, I remember reading about an ancient still being developed adventure game. It was from Eastern Europe (former Yugoslavia, I want to say) about being trapped in a prison that had crazy amounts of depth and consequences. One of them being something like picking up a random unused condom on the floor will result in the pregnancy of another character in a later chapter. I've searched for it again and can't find it, and I couldn't have dreamed it up. Anyone know the game?

matthewsinclair 1y ago

This is amazing. Replace “Atari 800” with “TI 99/4a” (and the fact that he eventually finished the game) and you have the story of my early life as a programmer! Well done for shipping. That’s the hardest thing of all to do!

scoot 1y ago

"That's not a verb I recognise." (So. Many. Times!) Sorry, but that isn't a verb recognition problem, it's a comprehension problem. I agree with the downvoted poster that LLM integration would significantly improve the end user experience. However the LLM should not be arbiter of game state (as they suggested), but simply the translator that ensures that the players instructions are understood by the game.

scoot 1y ago

I'm imagining the application of text adventures specifically designed for second language learning. Quite the possibilities!

amiga386 1y ago

You could do this too! If you don't feel you have the coding chops for it, read Usbourne's WRITE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE PROGRAMS FOR YOUR MICROCOMPUTER and you'll learn all the secrets of adventure game programmers! https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bxv0SsvibDMTYkFJbUswOHFQclE/view?resourcekey=0-ffScR4l9gOJrDiFw5Kb5fg https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bxv0SsvibDMTYkFJbUswOHFQclE... [PDF]

adamdiy 1y ago

ready.

kqr 1y ago

I took an hour or so out of my day to finish this game and review it on ifdb.org. It was a very pleasant experience, barring the large amount of unimplemented scenery. I would have hoped for a slightly more vivid world and not just a backdrop for puzzles! Thanks for sharing. Very intriguing collaboration between child-author and adult-author.