
Wander (1974) – a lost mainframe game is found - wodow
https://ahopeful.wordpress.com/2015/04/22/wander-1974-a-lost-mainframe-game-is-found/
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diiq
This game is not only an early text adventure -- it is early interactive _fan_
fiction. See Keith Laumer's Jame Retief stories:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jame_Retief](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jame_Retief)

The CDT, Mr. Magnan -- the whole scenario is straight from Laumer's work. Fan
fiction inspires all great things :)

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DougMerritt
I have a copy of this (Peter Langston's Wander C source code) from a 1980
distribution.

I don't think it was ever "lost", it just became gradually more obscure over
time, as most things do.

Edit: Looking closer, I see that Langston's 1980 distribution also included
Empire (PDP11 object files, not source! -- infamously), "Fast Food" (with C
source), and "Star_Drek" \-- object files again)

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wodow
[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_adventure](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_adventure)
implies Adventure was first in "around" 1975, but this blog post says WANDER
was 1974.

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joncameron
Wikipedia is notorious in the video game history community for its lack of
accuracy and vague primary sources.

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_delirium
In this case, Wikipedia's citation leads (via an intermediate hop) to an
academic article that dates Adventure to 1975-76, and argues that a date of
1972, which some other sources had previously mentioned, is incorrect:
[http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/001/2/000009/000009...](http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/001/2/000009/000009.html)

~~~
ChuckMcM
Last I checked Don Woods was at Google so someone there could just ask him.

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themartorana
> _Sure enough, after a little tweaking_

Just a reminder, the ESA would like to make this a crime.

Edit: the source was retrieved from the original author. I stand down.

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mratzloff
This is great! I look forward to seeing the original (and modified) source
code released. I love old text adventure games.

If you want to try your hand at another obscure, early text adventure, there's
a version of Warp (early 1980s) hosted here:

[http://empire.openmpe.com/empire/other_games.html](http://empire.openmpe.com/empire/other_games.html)

(You have to access it through telnet.)

It's a huge game with a very advanced parser, but it only runs on the HP e3000
and the source code has never been released. This is another one I'd like to
eventually see the source code to, but I tried contacting one of the authors
and got no reply.

