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Classic text adventure fans rejoice because the ’80s are back with 1981’s Arctic Adventure returning for its 40-year anniversary — purely by coincidence. This text-based survival game was written by a 17-year-old Harry McCracken and published in “The Captain 80 Book of BASIC Adventures,” with one unfortunate flaw: The way it was printed in the book, the game was completely unplayable. Now, 40 years later, the game has been debugged, lightly remastered, and made available to play online.
Back in the days of TRS-80 microcomputers, where anyone with sufficient knowledge of BASIC and enough RAM could create a game, coding enthusiasts would write text adventures and have them published in printed game collections. Buyers of these collections would then pick an adventure, spend hours typing all of the included code into their computers, and then either play the game or spend a few more hours going through the code to find their typos. This process, of course, meant that mistakes in the original code were extra tough to pick out.
Arctic Adventure is one such text adventure. It’s a survival game in which you have to input simple instructions to explore the world and get your character back to their base before they succumb to the harsh Arctic environment. An environment that, for the record, McCracken notes he had no experience of and did no research on. In this world, you start in a small igloo, where the game tells you you can see a shovel and a coat. However, a mistake in the code led to the unfortunate result that any text you input couldn’t be processed, so you couldn’t even “GET SHOVEL,” much less clear the game.
A Long-Living Bug
Earlier this year and 40 years after its release, McCracken was finally able to get his hands on a copy of the original book his game was published in. He fired up a TRS-80 emulator on his iPad and typed the whole thing up, only to find that there was a tiny, yet completely game-breaking typo: a single “0” missing from a character string. This one missing digit rendered the system unable to process the English language and, as a result, any attempted input. McCracken is unsure whether this was a typo on his part or a printing error, as he had played the game extensively while writing it, but it has been fixed and the game slightly updated to better suit the 21st century.
Finding the mistake may have taken 40 years, but fixing it took seconds and this classic text adventure is now available online, where anyone can play it from their browser. Further, for text adventure or coding enthusiasts who are looking for that true ’80s experience, a full scan of the original Captain 80 Book, as well as a number of TRS-80 emulators, are also easily accessible at no cost.
