Stumbled across your newsletter this week and immediately thought "I wonder if it covers that Curses thing I played when I was 12". Serious nostalgia trip - I never got very far in the game, but it kindled an immediate interest in IF that has never gone away. Thanks for writing this!
I only learned this recently! And I've spend the last month or so recreating both the first release (#7) and the final release (#16) from decompilation of the gamefiles: https://github.com/allengarvin/curses
It was enormous fun revisiting these, and getting to know them far better than I did when they came out. The final release is enormous in conception, but you can tell there were plans to expand it further that never came to light, the whole thing about the 3 different high rods having 3 separate paths to complete the game, but as it is, they're just something tacked on with explanation. The final end game, the "Master Game", is the only section of the whole thing that changes almost none-at-all from the earliest and the last release.
I'm still tidying up both, but they're both playable and winnable. I've used a more modern Inform 6 library but kept all the gameplay bugs, in order to be as faithful as possible.
Stumbled across your newsletter this week and immediately thought "I wonder if it covers that Curses thing I played when I was 12". Serious nostalgia trip - I never got very far in the game, but it kindled an immediate interest in IF that has never gone away. Thanks for writing this!
"The source code, sadly, is believed lost."
I only learned this recently! And I've spend the last month or so recreating both the first release (#7) and the final release (#16) from decompilation of the gamefiles: https://github.com/allengarvin/curses
It was enormous fun revisiting these, and getting to know them far better than I did when they came out. The final release is enormous in conception, but you can tell there were plans to expand it further that never came to light, the whole thing about the 3 different high rods having 3 separate paths to complete the game, but as it is, they're just something tacked on with explanation. The final end game, the "Master Game", is the only section of the whole thing that changes almost none-at-all from the earliest and the last release.
I'm still tidying up both, but they're both playable and winnable. I've used a more modern Inform 6 library but kept all the gameplay bugs, in order to be as faithful as possible.
Don't forget PunyInform too. You can now export a game to 25 retro computer systems in under 5 seconds!
https://github.com/ByteProject/Puddle-BuildTools