The very first computer game I played in 1971 was called Colony.

Colony was someone's attempt to turn the secretary problem into a computer game. Except instead of trying to hire one secretary, you were piloting a starship full of colonists and you would visit n planets in order, whereupon you were told how suitable they were for colonization (using Star Trek like planet classes) and you got to decide how many colonists you would beam down to colonize it. At the end, you were rated on your performance.

It is the game that turned me into a hacker. Unfortunately I never got to play it again and I never found its source code nor any reference to this game. And it wasn't until I heard about the secretary problem as an adult that I figured out what the game was really about.

Loved this post but it was funny that the story is basically “game is lost, so I emailed the game’s author, who sent me a copy, game is found”.

I liked this bit in the man page:

  BUGS
  
       Ho ho ho.

How does this not contain the line: "Not all those who wander are lost"?

So how does the game engine work? Anyone looked at the code and want to take a stab at describing the basic algorithm?

Its interesting to imagine asking a bunch of normal devs today to make a basic text adventure. Imagine the approaches they'd take and how lost they'd be!? :D

The very first game I played as called "L Game" on the rare (and underappreciated) RM Nimbus 80186s at high school in the UK. It was a text adventure and the rooms were forming an L. A quick googling finds a playable version online: http://bbcmicro.co.uk/game.php?id=2147 (there goes my afternoon)

Very minor nitpick: Unix machines were never considered mainframes. Unix was born on small computers (legend says its name is a jab at MINIX, which ran on mainframes) and had its most impact was in mini and midrange computers before the arrival of sufficiently capable technical workstations, and only very rarely ran on the really big mainframe-class computers as their main OS.

I wonder how similar these 1980 versions of Wander are to the 1974 original.

It's 2 minutes in and I allready have condoms...

This appears to be a blog post from 2015 so maybe not as newsworthy as the headline would indicate.