Thissala: Under Construction

(Continued from my previous posts.) One thing to keep in mind with mainframe adventure games is they were often experienced by players of that period in a state of “under construction”. This started directly with Crowther who left a literal “under construction” sign in the lower parts of his cave, where one of the exits simply crashes the game. This was kept to an extent by Woods (who left “under construction” in at Witt’s End) but Woods also had one release that included his own “under construction” sign, where the troll bridge would later be. David Lebling’s map of the “250 point” variant of Adventure, at his GDC 2014 postmortem of Zork. While the most recent version of game (as complete as the authors have made it) is generally what modern players have, someone playing Acheton in 1978 (directly on campus at Cambridge) would not have the same gameplay as someone playing Acheton in 1981. It’s easy to forget we aren’t dealing with static works but moving targets, and David Lebling…