Scott adams | Through the Shattered Lens

You are in a deserted ghost town. Why are you in the town? Who knows? What can you do in the town? You can search it and try to find 13 hidden treasures without falling prey to ghosts, rattlesnakes, or the weather. Good luck! There are many puzzles to be solved. Hopefully, you’re better at puzzles than I am.

Ghost Town was one of the many text adventures to be written by Scott Adams in the early 80s. Every text adventure film that has come out since owes debt to Scott Adams but that doesn’t make his games any less frustrating to play. Basically, with this game, you get bare-bone descriptions and a two-word parser. Don’t try to have a conversation with anything in the town. Don’t try to get too creative with your choice of verbs or with any of the things that you find in the town. This is from the early days of PC gaming and it’s as basic as can be.

Once you make the adjustment, though, it’s not a bad game. Even the minimal descriptions of each location encourage the player to imagine the place for himself. (Basic games like Ghost Town actually encourage the imagination more than games that devote paragraphs to intricate descriptions.) It’s also a timed game, which was a big deal in the early 80s. The ghosts in the town keep their own schedule and one of the challenges of the game is to keep up with them. Spending too much time on one puzzle or trying to guess the verb can lead to consequences. The puzzles are complicated but there’s a walk-through so you can cheat if you need to. Just don’t make the same mistake that I did.

Play Ghost Town!

You have just woken up in a bed in a Transylvanian castle. Why are you there? You’re on a mission. What type of mission? It’s Transylvania and the game is called The Count. You figure it out. You’ve got three days to figure out how to kill Count Dracula or you’ll suffer a fate worse than death. Make a mistake and you might become a vampire during the night. Try to leave the castle early and you’ll get torn apart by the angry villagers.

The Count is a very early text adventure game, one of the many that was created and designed by Scott Adams in the days when having a personal computer was considered to be a luxury instead of a necessity. The Count has everything that you would usually expect from an Adams game: minimalist descriptions, silly humor (“The signs says ‘POSITIVE NO SMOKING ALLOWED’ signed Count Dracula.”), and puzzles that often take more than one run-through to solve. It also has a simple two-word parser that, for modern players, might require some getting used to.

Historically, The Count is important because it was one of the first games to have a fixed time limit. Timed challenges have always been my downfall, as anyone who has ever watched me play any of Spider-Man‘s side missions can tell you. Solving The Count is not as challenging as catching Howard’s pigeons but it will still probably require a replay or two.

Like all of Scott Adams’s game, The Count has been adapted for other Interactive Fiction interpreters and can be downloaded for free.. The 1982 re-release, which came with graphics, can be played at the Internet Archive.