An old TOPS adventure game

[Galen Tackett]

Many years ago at a DECUS symposium I saw a Dungeon (or Zork) style game
called, I think, Mansion, running on a Tops-20 system. You started out
the game somewhere outside of a (haunted?) mansion. All I can remember
of it is that I managed to get onto the mansion's grounds once or twice,
and maybe into the mansion once, before meeting my demise.

I'm pretty sure I saw this at my very first DECUS symposium, which was
at the San Francisco Hilton in about 1978.

Does anybody know more about this game? Was or is it available for any
other systems? (36-bit DEC systems are in rather short supply here!)
--
Galen Tackett
Lockheed Martin Missiles & Space
O/EA-20 B/152
PO Box 3504
Sunnyvale, CA 94088-3504

Phone: (408)742-2552
Before sending mail, remove ".no.spam" from my address!

[Lawrence MacIntyre]

Galen Tackett wrote:
>
> Many years ago at a DECUS symposium I saw a Dungeon (or Zork) style game
> called, I think, Mansion, running on a Tops-20 system. You started out
> the game somewhere outside of a (haunted?) mansion. All I can remember
> of it is that I managed to get onto the mansion's grounds once or twice,
> and maybe into the mansion once, before meeting my demise.
>
> I'm pretty sure I saw this at my very first DECUS symposium, which was
> at the San Francisco Hilton in about 1978.
>
> Does anybody know more about this game? Was or is it available for any
> other systems? (36-bit DEC systems are in rather short supply here!)

You were playing Haunt. That was by far the best adventure-style game I
ever played. The people who wrote it must have been pretty twisted:-)
I only saw it on TOPS-10 and TOPS-20, and I never saw source, so I don't
know anything about current availability. Getting into the mansion
involved climbing up a wall and getting in a window. I never got out.
There were secret tunnels, an underground ocean, a moose would run past
you each 60 moves, etc.
--

Lawrence
~
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Lawrence MacIntyre Oak Ridge National Laboratory 423.574.8696
l...@ornl.gov http://www.epm.ornl.gov/~lpz l...@nautique.epm.ornl.gov

[Steven Hobbs]

In article <340201...@nautique.epm.ornl.gov>, Lawrence MacIntyre <l...@nautique.epm.ornl.gov> writes:

>Galen Tackett wrote:
>
>You were playing Haunt. That was by far the best adventure-style game I
>ever played. The people who wrote it must have been pretty twisted:-)
>I only saw it on TOPS-10 and TOPS-20, and I never saw source, so I don't
>know anything about current availability.

Haunt was written by John Laird at CMU as part of his thesis reserarch
into an Artificial Inteligence technique called production systems. At
the time Haunt was written it was the world's largest non-trivial production
system. (Digital later wrote a larger production system (called XCON??)
which was used to configure large, complicated VAX systems). I assume
that Haunt would run on any system with the appropriate production system
interpretter.

Haunt was a great game. Doing well with a game of Haunt required the
user to know alot of trivia about old newspaper comic strips.

[Richard M. Alderson III]

In article <5ucnh8$fne$1...@nntpd.lkg.dec.com> ho...@steven.zko.dec.com
(Steven Hobbs) writes:

>At the time Haunt was written it was the world's largest non-trivial
>production system.

>[snip]

>I assume that Haunt would run on any system with the appropriate production
>system interpretter.

The one time I got it running, I could tell that it had a Lisp behind it (well,
that was easy to guess, 'cause it wouldn't run till I found a coy of CLISP.HGH)
but that was about all. It wasn't particularly friendly to Tops-20, but then,
neither was CMU (a major Tops-10 site). ;->
--
Rich Alderson You know the sort of thing that you can find in any dictionary
of a strange language, and which so excites the amateur philo-
logists, itching to derive one tongue from another that they
know better: a word that is nearly the same in form and meaning
as the corresponding word in English, or Latin, or Hebrew, or
what not.
--J. R. R. Tolkien,
alde...@netcom.com _The Notion Club Papers_