Interactive Fiction blog Regna in Blue reports that a rare variant of classic Adventure, that was playable on Compuserve for many years and only went down when their game offerings went offline in the mid 90s, has been recovered and made playable online.
It’s called Adventure 751 in reference to the number of available points there are to find. The post in turn links to Arthur O’Dwyer’s article on this version, and other versions, which seem to contain substantial added content from the original Crowther & Woods version.
It’s playable, but requires a lot of effort to get there, including compiling a PDP10 emulator and loading a disk image into it. I wish VCFMW wasn’t months behind me now, it’d have been a blast to see if someone there had access to a working PDP10, and if the game could have been transferred onto it!
As O’Dwyer mentions, there are plenty of games from this era that are just completely, utterly lost, with practically no chance of recovery. And even versions like this, that can technically be played, still hang on by just a thread. The people who created them often don’t have accessible archives, and the institutions who hosed them rare seem interest in preserving them. It’s a sorry state indeed, but at least there are a few survivals like this one.
Thanks for the writeup!
I prefer to be half-glass-full on the amount lost: it’s honestly impressive how much still exists (compared to other mediums). I think adventures in particular had people being more inclined to preserve them. There’s hundreds of 1979-1980 TRS-80 programs from a company called Instant Software where about 95% of them are “lost”, but the one that’s an adventure is preserved. There’s a set of programs by Tom Sato for BBC Micro and the only one that’s been rescued is his “adventure” because it was copied to a tape called “adventures”. Nobody cared about his variation of Star Trek or Scramble.
Sometime in 2026 (likely summer) I’m going to play a lost game recently preserved off of Data General drives that’s absolutely enormous and completely unknown/undocumented, so there’s still more material coming through.
Yay, hello! Thanks back at you, I’m glad that at least these games are preserved!
Your blog is such a resource, thanks so much for maintaining it!
Also, if I don’t crosslink your post on the game from the Data General drives it’ll probably have slipped my mind, feel free to remind me!