Creating adventure games on your computer

What Hacker News says

1. nzduckOct 2025
   It was Tim Harnell's book Creating Adventure Games On Your Computer that rekindled my interest in him as an author. Brings back fun memories of slogging through program listings in front of my ZX Spectrum and C64 :)
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2. jessehorneDec 2023
   I started programming when I was around 12. My teacher told me about how he learned BASIC in school...so I went home and looked up BASIC. I had a lot of fun messing around with qbasic/qb64 and finally FreeBASIC. Semi-related but one of my favorite books of all time was Creating Adventure Games On Your Computer by Tim Hartnell. It's wild to think how much of an impact that book and FreeBASIC had on me. If I could upvote this a thousand times I would.
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3. neoviveMay 2009
   Great list of books! How great is this book from 1984 - Creating Adventure Games on Your Computer (http://www.atariarchives.org/adventure/)
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4. cubicle67Mar 2012
   hey, I learned on a Vic-20 too. Loved it and (to my parent's dismay) spent far too much time writing programmes than doing "normal" kid things. Then one day I got a book - something like "How to write adventure games". One of the best books I've ever read. I loved it

   This book showed me how to design and write, from scratch, a real adventure game. How to design a game and draw maps (well, I was pretty accomplished at that already), how mazes worked, how to parse and handle the standard verb-noun input. Everything! I remember writing games and taking them (on cassette) to show my teacher at school. Awesome times.

   [Edit: I've spent the last half hour looking, but no joy yet. It's not "Creating Adventure Games on Your Computer (Tim Hartnell) nor "Write Your Own Adventure Programs" (Jenny Tyler and Les Howarth)

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