Old Adventures In Lo-Fi Trivia Quiz

Answer: Sherwood Forest

"Sherwood Forest" by Dale Johnson and Dav Holle was released by Phoenix Software in 1982 (release dates stated throughout this quiz are relevant to the Apple II platform). It can be found in the list of top 10 adventure games in many game rating sites. It had fine graphics, a smart verb-noun parser for your text commands and a splendid logical chain leading to the solution. I am not sure why they used the name Marion rather than Marian, but you also got to meet Friar Tuck, Little John, the Sheriff and the Merry Men along your way.

Answer: Voodoo Castle

No quiz on adventure games would be complete without mentioning a contribution from the prolific Scott Adams. "Voodoo Castle" (1980) was released by his company Adventure International and was also credited to the name of his wife Alexis. Other classic adventure games by Adams were "Adventureland", "The Count", "Mystery Fun House" and "Pyramid Of Doom".

Answer: Afghanistan

"Kabul Spy" (1982) by Tim Wilson was released by the legendary Sirius Software which had classic action games such "Sneakers", "Autobahn", "Gorgon" and "Outpost" to its name. Adventure games were definitely not a Sirius hallmark, but "Kabul Spy" had a good plot (and basic graphics). You started the game in Pakistan, bribed your way to Kabul (remember these were the days of Russian occupation of Afghanistan) and if you were smart enough you got back on a plane with kidnapped professor Paul Eisenstadt.

Answer: Taipan

"Taipan" (1982) released by Avalanche Productions was a fine game of strategy with minimal graphics. You navigated, traded and battled by selecting more or less constant menu items. The only problem is that as the game progressed (it could go on endlessly by the way, or until you decide to retire), you stopped trading the low margin general goods, ammunition and silk, and became a mass-trafficking opium overlord. To me, this only added another educational layer and I decided to become an honest terminal preppy ;p) The wrong options are action games, all of which with a marine theme.

Answer: False

"Softporn Adventure" (1981) written by Chuck Benton and released by On-Line Systems was purely textual. As its name suggests, it did have a mild sexual context, losing one's virginity and all that jazz. Due to its popularity and commerciality it was graphically adapted in 1987 as "Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards". The game's cover had three semi-nude women bathing with a (dressed) waiter standing, inside the bath. One of these women is Roberta Williams, the game designer and co-owner of On-Line Systems (which later became gaming giant Sierra On-Line).

Answer: 100 Years of Solitude

I guess no one could have been genius enough to be able to transpose the genius of Gabriel Garcia Marquez to an adventure game. The other worthy candidates which made it were "Alice in Wonderland" (Windham, 1985), "The Fellowship of the Ring" (Beam, 1986) and even "Fahrenheit 451" (Telarium, 1986).

Answer: Deadline

"Deadline" (1982) was written by Marc Blank and released by the IF mammoth Infocom. IF stands for "Interactive Fiction" which is the modern-day term for what was called "text-based adventure games" back in the 1980s. "Deadline" included a few gimmicks such as the concept of passing time and a time limit to decipher what happened to a wealthy Connecticut businessman found dead in his mansion.

It was also the first game to introduce the Infocom concept of "feelies" which were game-related accessories distributed with original copies of the game - surprising to learn that intelligent ways of fighting piracy emerged as early as that.

Answer: Transylvania

"Transylvania" (1982) was released by Penguin Software and written by Antonio Antiochia, who went on to code its two sequels, "The Crimson Crown" (1985) and "Transylvania III: Vanquish the Night" (1989). It used a pretty standard verb-noun syntax and basic graphics yet it seemed to have an eerie added value to it - what's in a name, some would say. The wrong options are two pinball applications ("Raster Blaster" and "David's Midnight Magic"), and "Aztec", a grand action game in its own right which unfortunately eludes the scope of this quiz.

Answer: True

"Masquerade" (1983) by Dale Johnson was released by Phoenix Software. Johnson wrote it in the wake of his "Sherwood Forest" which was released the year before. The modest graphics were as excellent as the ones of "Sherwood Forest" and the game syntax was based on the same parsing engine, but the game logic of "Masquerade" was much tougher to crack and you needed to twist your imagination to the point of the absurd in order to solve it. Ok, maybe you needed it, because I gave up and used a cheat sheet.

Answer: Colossal Cave Adventure

In the beginning... before there was Apple II, I used to sneak into the Ben-Gurion university in my hometown of Be'er Sheva, use a hacked password of one of the PDP-10 mainframe computer users and enter that wonderful cave maze created by William Crowther and Don Woods. You could lose yourself in there for hours on. Crowther, a caver himself, constructed the cave maze based on the topology of Kentucky Mammoth Cave array which must have earned a lot of visitors over the years as a result (much more information can be found in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_Cave_Adventure).

"Eliza" (1966) was a mock-therapist software written by Joseph Weizenbaum in the SLIP code which he developed. It had many incarnations in the mainframe world and in the PC world. Nowadays you can find a few online versions and implementations in the Internet.

Yes, the name of this quiz is a pun offshooting from the R.E.M. album ("New Adventures In Hi-Fi"). Hope you enjoyed playing it as much as I enjoyed writing it. Cheers!