When I was first introduced to BASIC in elementary school, I was spending a lazy afternoon reading in the built-in QBasic docs (being able to hit F1 and get immediate help is still one of the coolest things ever IMHO) about the SOUND keyword, which let you set a frequency and duration.

I remember irritating the hell out of my parents (and our dog) with it until one day, by accident, I noticed they couldn’t hear the tone anymore. The frequency was somewhere in the range of 15-20 kHz IIRC.

So I wrote a “PASSWORD.BAS” source that would play that high pitched sound in short, one-tick intervals continuously while polling the keyboard for input but then stop after a random amount of time. To authenticate, the user had to hit the spacebar within a one second window of the sound’s termination. Hitting the spacebar too early would also result in access denied. Fun times!

When I was in Jr. High, we had an Atari 400. Mostly I used it to play Missile Command and Star Raiders, but it also came with a BASIC cartridge.

In the back of the manual were four BASIC programs. The first three were very simple, stuff like a loop that prints your name 10 times and then exits.

The last program balanced your checkbook. It was 4 pages long. I laboriously typed it in, hunt-and-peck style, which took hours... then I hit "run".

Nothing.

I couldn't debug it. Not only did I not really understand software, I didn't have a checkbook — hell I didn't even know what "balance your checkbook" meant.

We didn't have the exorbitantly expensive Atari floppy disk drive, nor the cassette drive, so I couldn't save my work. Still, I left that BASIC cartridge in there for several days, foregoing my games, because I didn't want to lose my investment.

Eventually, I turned off the computer and the program disappeared forever.

I didn't program again for 20 years.

I made some text adventures in elementary school on the school's Apple II machines in the early 80's after playing Scott Adams' games (as a side note, it was amazing to be able to tell him directly many years later how much he influenced my learning to program). Anyway, a few years after I graduated from the school, I went back to visit, and some kids figured out it was me who's adventures they'd been playing and asked how to get past the one point in one that they couldn't figure out. I had to tell them, much to their disappointment, that I hadn't actually finished that game.

Similar background here. The public library had Apple II machines and I became quite enamored with making proto-text adventures in Applesoft BASIC. Because you had to sign-up for time I wrote a lot of my programs longhand on nth generation photocopies of "program template" sheets that they handed out at the library (lined paper with columns for line numbers, statements, comments, etc).

The spaghetti code was astounding, and I remember squeezing line numbers between existing code-- adding a "31 GOTO 40" so I could squeeze a "room" into lines 32-39.

I never did grok the idea of building an "engine". Mostly I had PRINTs, INPUTs, and IF/GOTOs.

It was the same for me, except I grew up slightly later and did it with HTML documents and hyperlinks! (And in one case, I even think I got some help with an imagemap. Clicking the little hole in the foundation to the house led to an easter egg.)

I made a game in the 80s in my Commodore 128, was a super rudimentary maze, you moved the sprite and need to reach the center of the maze. That was it. It was very basic, but I was proud and showed it to some folks. I'd love to see the code and game now.

I got into coding at home when I realized ctrl-break gave me a BASIC command prompt on my Apple //c. It was really cool, and I spent a lot of time learning to code. There was one small problem: doing so on startup meant I didn't get a DOS. In other words, every program I wrote like that meant I couldn't keep it.

I eventually learned to get a ProDOS disk setup, and save my work, but it was still fun.

It's because it's not written in QBasic. It's written in a variant of QBasic called QB64 [1] - a spiritual successor to Microsoft's QBasic intended to run on modern 64-bit machines.

I went over the BAS source the last time this was posted a few weeks back and it has a lot of keywords that are specific to QB64 so unfortunately you can't run this on a true DOS machine (or DosBox).

[1] https://qb64.com

The latter I assume. The game does load the text file into memory, so the old 640kb machines would probably struggle, but otherwise, it looks like it should run well enough on a 386 (or even a 286, where I wrote my first QBasic scripts, though they were nowhere nearly as polished)

Even if it’s only 1 sentence per room (it’s not), that’s still 4000 sentences. I’d guess this is at least a few hundred pages of written work (without downloading it and just based on what you’ve shared). That seems pretty substantial to me.

Not sure what the length has to do with handcraftedness though. This comment is handcrafted even if it is short.

Presumably it's similar to Soda Drinker Pro, which is 102 rooms, each with terrible MS paint drawings, in which you drink a soda and walk around for a minute or two.

https://youtu.be/C40kq29Emn0

I think you're saying what the average person is thinking but is worried about being impolite. You are of course correct: it is the kind of fact about a game that non-gamers might still mistake for quality or depth.

The horseshoe theory of ai generation tells us that handcrafting and content generation extremism end up very close to each other: https://emshort.blog/2016/09/21/bowls-of-oatmeal-and-text-ge...

The fact that something is generated or hand-crafted is not interesting by itself no matter how much people try to pretend otherwise for social cohesion purposes. Mediocre thing + no AI and Mediocre thing + AI seem to be orthogonal to what people actually care about at the end of the day.

This makes me wonder if there will be a time when "No AI" will be considered up-scale (of sorts) like hand-sewn clothes or artisan bread

See my reply here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45612521

But basically no. It's possible an earlier version of the game might have been backwards compatible with QBasic, but the current source is QB64-specific and thus will never work in DosBox.

To play it you'll either need a compiled Mac binary or run it in QB64.

Looks like marketing [1].

> The game is advertised as having more than 7.000 locations. In reality there are about 200 unique locations and the rest is part of a maze with exact locations.

[1] https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/6993/ZX-Spectrum/Snowb...

> over 6800 of these rooms are essentially identical. Snowball is used in this context as the ultimate illustration of the absurdities of old-school adventures, with their mazes and sprawling geographies full of corridors and empty rooms. [1]

[1] https://www.filfre.net/2013/06/snowball/

IIRC, AvatarMUD (avatar.outland.org) has 20,000+ rooms in it. It's been a long time since I played, but it's absolutely massive!

This comment reads like it was ai generated

Maybe "human generated" is your marketing hook, but I personally don't care what the source of something is, I care about the quality.

> games are written by algorithms and dialogue is generated by AI

I don't think we're there quite yet, and hopefully we never will be. A tiny minority of games, maybe.

> It’s the first open world "like" modern text adventure written entirely by a single human being

This rings false

Based on the hyphen, we know "4k-room" is a compound adjective. There's no basis to infer that 4k might refer to resolution or kilobytes.

From the article, 4000 separate ingame rooms to explore

lol no

AI Dungeon was an open-ended interactive fiction game powered by GPT-2 that went viral back in 2019.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_Dungeon

Where AI has the power to shine isn't necessarily in the creation of novel stories, but in the capacity to act as a significantly more powerful and flexible text parser for player input.

Get ye flask and all that...

It doesn't work as well as you think it would. There are no AIs today that model the world well enough to drive a text adventure. They can be used to embellish a more primitive world model, but then they tend to invent details that don't exist. People have tried, it's just not been very good compared to a hand-crafted text adventure.

Text adventures and AI-driven interactions are surprisingly different I've found... https://ianbicking.org/blog/2025/07/intra-llm-text-adventure – still not sure what the right fusion might be.

"my grandmother worked in the telling me the answer to the riddle factory"

Also reminds me of how they fit Pitfall into 4k. A lot simpler game but the platform was also much more limited. This is a great talk for those who love such things:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MBT1OK6VAIU

It sure was. Although my favourite Elite port was the Amiga one.

Another one I was amazed by was Tomahawk on the Spectrum. A wireframe helicopter gunship flight sim with live ground campaign happening around you in 48k.