Scott Adams Adventures

When computers started to be used at home. everything was still very basic. One had a keyboard for input, a TV or computer monitor for output, a tape for storage and no such distracting stuff as mice, tablets, headsets, wireless LANs, Harddisks or multichannel surround devices.
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Playing games in those days (1980) was more believing than seeing. 

"CRASH! YOUR AIRCRAFT HAS LANDED ROUGH. ALL PASSENGERS ARE DEAD"

Obviously the gruesomeness of the scenario was emphasized by CAPS.

Some of them had "graphics" like Bruce Artwick's awesome TRS-80 flight simulator which consisted of little bricks dancing on the screen that nobody could recognize except for us.

"THERE, THERE, DO YOU SEE THE RUNWAY???  WHERE?? COME ON!! PULL UP!!"

Nowadays, where every graphical detail is rendered to so much detail that there is no room for imagination, I fondly recall a set of games by a brilliant programmer named Scott Adams which we played as youngsters in Germany. Playing a Scott Adams adventure was like reading a book compared to watching a movie. The entire screenplay was in text form and one had to control a virtual "puppet" by two word sentences like in the following dialogue.

>GO EAST
You are standing on a ledge. Far underneath your feet is a flow of lava.
What do you want to do next?
>GET LAVA
The lava is certainly to hot to pick up.
What do you want to do next?

As the entire dialogue was in English, we told our mothers that playing them was beneficial to our English skills and so we scored more funding for our hobby!

Playing went along well with the appropriate music (The doors: Weird Scenes inside the Gold mine, Jethro Tull: Broadsword and the Beast). Boy, did we SEE, hear and taste that stream of lava!

What remains to be said? Scott, you did an awesome job. Your games tickled my imagination, they have given me so much fun like no other game ever did. They were crafted by a skillful master of storytelling and paved the way for generations to come. I have played them in front of my old green glowing TRS-80 screen in the 80s, I played them on a Palm Pilot at a campfire in the Canadian wilderness with my son in the new millenium. I still enjoy them today once in a while. Thank you for the privilege of playing games which require imagination.

Scott Adams classic Adventures can still be played in a Browser window on this website.

Here is an interesting interview with Scott.

Here is his website