“Adventure” on Python 3.2 on a Heathkit H19

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    In 1976, the famous Adventure game appeared. Previous computer games offered only abstract concepts and rules, like the pieces and moves of chess or checkers. But Adventure offered a world to explore, items to carry, and objects to manipulate as the player tried to find the treasures hidden in a system of underground caves.

    Early this year I ported Adventure to Python 3, partly to get practice with the new version of my favorite programming language, but even more because I wanted to finally learn all of Adventure's secrets. There is no exercise like re-implementing a computer program to make you really learn every single detail of how it operated — because I had to duplicate every single behavior of the old program in my new code.

    I was very happy with the response, including several laughs when I presented my work in a five-minute lightning talk at this year's PyCon. In the photo above, you can see the past meeting the future meeting the past: the old Adventure game, rewritten and running under modern Python 3, but displayed on a vintage 1970s computer terminal — exactly the sort of screen and keyboard on which the original players would have met the game!

    About the original game:

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventure_game
    www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/001/2/000009/000009.html

    My version:

    pypi.python.org/pypi/adventure

    My lightning talk (skip to around 1:05):

    blip.tv/pycon-us-videos-2009-2010-2011/pycon-2011-sunday-...

    Oleg Bartunov, Jiri Brozovsky, and 1 other people added this photo to their favorites.

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