Cover to Cover: Adventure International 1981 Catalog (pp. 3-4)

Our cover-to-cover pagethrough of the Spring 1981 Adventure International catalog continues, capturing the home computer game industry in its very early years.  I was a huge fan of Scott Adams' classic text adventures back in the day, so this will also feature a degree of personal reminiscence.  Whenever I open these aging pages, everything spins around and suddenly I'm elsewhere...

I'm going to let these next few pages speak for themselves, for the most part.  This page, reprinting an article by Ken Mazur from Creative Computing magazine, was another eye-opener for my younger self -- I realized that you could write about games as an art form, and discuss the nature of gaming as a serious subject.  It may have taken me several decades to get around to doing so myself, but I must have read this short piece dozens of times over the years, and I still regard it as a personal influence.

Page 4 is the big one -- it probably explains why I have always thought of the first nine Scott Adams Adventures (plus the Special Sampler demo) as the official "canon," solely because I walked in when this catalog page was current.  It describes the concept and the plots of these classic text adventures, "using all 16K of your computer."

If you'd like to know more, I have written about these classic text adventures at length:

#0 - Special Sampler

#1 - Adventureland

#2 - Pirate Adventure

#3 - Impossible Mission

#4 - Voodoo Castle

#5 - The Count

#6 - Strange Odyssey

#7 - Mystery Fun House

#8 - Pyramid of Doom

#9 - Ghost Town

Next weekend, we'll continue.