Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

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  • yeastbeast

    I suspect Anita Buyrite is a thinly-veiled reference to Anita Bryant, homophobic crooner of the late 1970′s.

    • Mark_Frauenfelder
    • Mark Dow

      Orange juice still gives me the creeps.

      • Antinous / Moderator

        She’s the mother of the modern gay pride movement. We went from 200 marchers in Boston in 1976 to 6,000 in 1977.

        • Mark Dow

          Yes, I was just catching up reading about her; I hadn’t realized how influential she was.

  • http://www.flickr.com/photos/stefan_e_jones/ Stefan Jones

    I didn’t buy a computer until 1983 . . . and when I did it was an IBM PC, which was really behind the curve as far as game availability.

    I remember looking through adverts in CREATIVE COMPUTING at advertisements for games like World Builder, and feeling so envious of computer owners and so horribly out of it. I played plenty of SF boardgames, and a play-by-mail SF empire game called STAR MASTER, but surely a sophisticated computer game would blow those away!

    I take some comfort, however belated, in seeing how lame this particular game appears to be.

    So, Mark, are you going to write up your visit to this rocket club?

    • Mark_Frauenfelder

      “So, Mark, are you going to write up your visit to this rocket club?” Yes! I’m writing it for the Make website but will cross-post it here.

  • http://www.matthewpetty.com/ Matthew Petty

    “Bandit: One who lives off the earnings of others (though not through a state-run welfare system)” – oh, naff off

  • Boundegar

    32 spectacular colors!

    • Vengefultacos

      32? Hah. Try 8. And 2 of those were black, and another two were white. And you couldn’t have certain colors next to each other or they’d bleed.
      And we liked it that way!

      • Nash Rambler

        White?  Hah!  We used to dream of white, w/ our black and green screens.  Why, it took a gang of two brawny men to wrestle the 8-inch floppy into the drive, and half-an-hour to load 100K.  That was real computing back in them days, it was.

  • Ken.C

    We had that game. I played it a lot, although I remember always being extraordinarily frustrated with it. Of course, I was probably only about 7 or 8 at the time. 

  • Bozobub

    You know, I think the person playing the demo would have done better if they had typed “LAND” or “LAND ON PLANET”.  Just sayin’ ^^’…

  • Ken.C

    Watching that, I have one word. Well, two. 

    LAND, moron!

  • pjcamp

    Well, any time you can get Jaclyn Smith on the cover . . . . 

  • Vengefultacos

    I love the ending. “Hey! You died in space after you jumped out of your ship in frustration. Be sure to buy the next game in the series!”

    A LOT of the games from this period were like this, sadly. A friend of mine played some adventure game whose name I am blocking. He reached the end, where I believe he had to light a fuse or a signal fire or something. And he had a lighter in his inventory. All means of trying to actually light the damn thing failed.. “light fuse” “light lighter” “light fuse with lighter” “ignite fuse” “use lighter” etc. All failed. And he died and had to start over. Again and again.

    As it turned out, the *only* way to light the item and finish the game was the command “flick bic”

    Apparently, game designers of the time thought good puzzle design involved guessing a magic phrase.

    • Boundegar
    • howaboutthisdangit

      The only difference between many commercial games of that era and the games you could find published in various books and magazines was the packaging.  Terse descriptions and limited command sets were the norm.  The easiest way to make a game last more than 10 minutes, or to get multiple plays, was to create frustrating, frequently game-ending puzzles.

      The documentation was often far more interesting than the game itself.

      My friends and I were blown away when we first encountered Zork, because it was so much bigger and better and more immersive than any previous adventure game.  I have no idea how many after-school hours I spent on the original Zork trilogy.

  • http://boingboing.net/ Rob Beschizza

    YOU ARE ENTERING YOUR ROCKET

  • jdk998

    We had M.U.L.E. on the Atari 800 and we loved it. Those crystite auctions were a blast. 

    R.I.P. Dani Bunten.

    • Nash Rambler

      Man, I loved M.U.L.E.

  • Heevee Lister

    Try typing ENT LEF DOO instead.  No guarantees that it would work here – I’ve never met this specific program – but back in the day, many of these “type a command phrase” programs and games were actually reading only the first few letters of each token in the command. 

  • Doppel Frog

    Playable online here: http://www.virtualapple.org/J_empirei-worldbuildersdisk.html
    Now, does anyone know what the commands are?

  • gwailo_joe

    Why is the tank track cargo truck shooting a warning laser blast over the dome of Hagia Sophia?

    Some thinly veiled anti-Turkish sentiment, eh?

    (And quite possibly deflected off one of the Space-Goddesses boobs…what an awesome game!)

  • dainel

    Bozobub and Ken.C is right. The correct command is LAND. Only GO OUT *after* landing.

    Thanks to Doppel Frog for the link. I tried it, and that works. But this does not change the fact that this game trully sucks.

    I like Montezuma’s Revenge much better.

  • Ken.C

    Seriously, that guy playing the demo is stupid. Single word commands work just fine, although I gotta say, Doppel Frog’s link goes to a game with some seriously ill equipped characters. The first one has a pistol, but no bullets. Whoops! In any case, thanks for the trip down memory lane. 

  • Sigmund_Jung

    The wonderful times when you could ask your nephew to draw your game cover.