Monday Memory: Adventure

Back in 1980 when Atari was the king of the video game hill I got the Adventure game as a holiday gift and sunk dozens of hours into it. It was a completely different game than all the others I played, where the goal was seemingly to just stay alive as long as possible. In Adventure I was pretty much safe except for the three dragons running around, and I just discovered the world and solved puzzles.

The hardest puzzle of course was the dark maze. The maze had walls like a normal maze, but the maze walls and the background were the same color so you had to memorize where all the turns were to get from one side to the other. It was a huge pain in the butt, and of course the game was designed so that you couldn't win without traversing it several times.

There were also keys and a sword, and you could 'carry' an item by holding down the joystick button and running over it. You could slay the dragons by stabbing them in the stomach with the sword without being eaten first. The keys opened different barriers, and it had a little fox-and-chicken logic that required you to do some things in a certain order. To make things just a little more chaotic, a bat would fly randomly through the world and occasionally steal what you were carrying or drop off a dragon in your neighborhood.

But imagination made the game great. I was a knight on an adventure, I had a sword, and woe be any seahorse-looking dragons who crossed my path. It was also the first video game I played that had an 'easter egg' in it. There was a one-pixel dot hidden in the dark maze that you could pick up and carry through and otherwise impervious glowing wall to a special screen that had a tribute to the author. This was a pretty hard easter egg to discover, and I've always been proud of finding it on my own.