Help with A Galactic Experience

[Game Odyssey]

Hello! My hobby is researching the history of old computer games. 

I have discovered A Galactic Experience in the archive and it piqued my interest since it is not mentioned almost anywhere. Does anyone have information on the game, its creator or the publisher? Are the other two Hoyle & Hoyle adventures available? I understand there was a hintbook published by the company. Is it available? If not can anyone help with solving it? 

On a sidenote, reading the help file, and playing with the parser it seems quite similar to Adventure. Did Hoyle & Hoyle use Gordon Letwin's source code to make their games or they just tried to faithfully recreate the Adventure experience? Any information would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you in advance. 

[Mark Garlanger]

I've played Galactic Experience quite a bit, many years ago, but did not complete it. I have some basic info about the company on my website - https://heathkit.garlanger.com/companies/HoyleHoyle/

I know I have a copy of Remarkable Experience and pretty sure also have Physical Experience.

Mark

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[Game Odyssey]

Wow, thanks. If you have any material on your hard drive and you wish to share (via e-mail) it would be greatly appreciated. I currently write about the history of games in a retro gaming forum  but eventually I'll start a blog. These three adventures may be known to Heath users, but completely unknown more broadly. They are not listed in Moby Games nor in https://ifdb.org/ and Adventureland. So I would love to be able to do a presentation of their games, but unfortunately my puzzle solving skills are very rusty. For the time being I can't find out how to wake up the drunk pilot in Galactic Adventure. Also it doesn't seem to be enough time (from 5:00 where you get the credits) to buy all the equipment and make it to the ship in time. 

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[Tim Gilberts]

Fascinating - are these games on the SEBHC archive anywhere?

Tim

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On 16 Jul 2022, at 10:34, Game Odyssey <2001gam...@gmail.com> wrote:



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[Game Odyssey]

I have only found Galactic Adventure but perhaps I don't know how to search properly. From what I understand Hoyle & Hoyle was the only publisher who refused to release their software but that was a long time ago. If they are still alive (sorry to be so grim but it was 40 years ago) they may have changed their mind or they may no longer care. 

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[Glenn Roberts]

So the “search” process is an Adventure game unto itself!  To my knowledge there is no searchable central repository of games for the H8/89 (or of our software in general!).  We’ve collectively done a pretty good job of rescuing software when we can; and Mark has probably the best attempt at cataloging things, doing due diligence (where feasible) to get permission to share, capturing scans of the documentation, e.g.:

 

https://heathkit.garlanger.com/software/library/

 

I think Mark has held back on sharing the Hoyle & Hoyle stuff due to lack of permission from the publisher. (we’ve had multiple discussion threads on the topic of sharing obsolete software and there are varying schools of thought on the best approach…)

 

The Application Archive Les Bird put together also has copies of many disks containing useful software

https://sebhc.github.io/sebhc/software.html

 

The only real indexes are the content listings Les has created for each volume.  These are literally dumps of disk collections that we have had the fortune to come across, however in there are some very useful programs and possibly games that aren’t captured in Mark’s archive.  There were a number of games published by HUG and Les has pulled together what HUG disks we’ve been able to rescue

https://sebhc.github.io/sebhc/software/HDOS/HUGLibrary.HTML

 

the original Adventure game is available as both a HUG disk and a version packaged by Software Toolworks.

https://heathkit.garlanger.com/software/library/TheSoftwareToolworks/

 

Someone with organizational skills could no doubt put together a more useful repository and index of what we’ve got…

 

• Glenn

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[Game Odyssey]

Glenn, thank you very much for the info. Your community has done an excellent  job cataloguing the software and documentation of Heathit computers. Indeed my "search" was to go to Les Bird's content listings for each volume and Ctrl+F for .CAV files since these games seem to share the same file structure with the original Adventure. I found A Galactic Experience but not Physical and Remarkable. I have also tried to find the hintbook of the game the company supposedly released (as advertised in magazines) in the documentation but no luck so far. 

Infocom Zork notwithstanding (which was way ahead of everything else), for a 1981 game Galactic Experience seems to be on par with every other text adventure released at the time. It really is a shame that it is unknown to the Interactive Fiction community. It is also a shame Gordon Letwin's conversion of Adventure for the H8, the first microcomputer port of the game, does not get the recognition it deserves. We keep hearing about Scott Adam's oversimplified version, but very little of Letwin's complete port which came out the same year. 

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[Les Bird]

Don't forget about the Wiki page where I attempted to organize all the software (at least the major ones) by publisher:

https://github.com/sebhc/sebhc/wiki

Les

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[Les Bird]

And here's a Wiki page with a complete dump of all the disks from the HUG library that we have. You can probably search this page. Perhaps I should make a similar page for the archived disks as well. Could be useful.

https://github.com/sebhc/sebhc/tree/master/wiki/DISKIMAGES/HUG

Les

[Tim Gilberts]

Of course if you like some coverage of Gordon Letwin’s H8 version I did a video last year which so why I was interested in these three games…

Finding the earliest Home Computer Text Adventure

https://youtu.be/P7XvHifN78k

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On 16 Jul 2022, at 14:11, Les Bird <lesb...@gmail.com> wrote:



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[Game Odyssey]

Very good video on Letwin's h8 version and doing the presentation on original hardware is a nice touch. Letwin's game is the first microcomputer adventure, a faithful  and damn impressive port of the original. We could still give to Scott Adams' Adventure the title of the first home computer adventure game, because buying all the necessary hadware (h8, terminal, memory expansion, disk drive) would cost you a kidney back in 1978. The Trash-80 was more affordable.