Jason Dyer

Will Moczarski (who I link in the post) has tried hard to get in touch with Corr and Denman but no luck. They don't seem to be interested in talking.

Madhouse (1981?) We have — or at least had — the early timeline of Med Systems well-understood. They were founded by William Denman out of North Carolina, and they were the ones responsible for Reality …

Med Systems published a catalog of four "adventure blobber" games from 1980 to 1982, made outside the regular arc of adventure game history.

Recently, I found a fifth game. It is not in any catalog or advertisement. It is a ghost from time that shouldn't exist.

bluerenga.blog/2025/11/12/m...

Graham being picked up by death in a boat

Ringen: Under the Low Morning Sun I’ve finished the game; my previous posts are needed for context. You can read my complete Ringen series including the 2019 content here, and my series starting from the DOS port here. Nearly…

in which I reach the end of the first adventure game in the Norwegian language, which has one of the more satisfying game endings I've experienced in a while

buried under bad RNG decisions, but you don't have to worry about those when you're just reading about it!

bluerenga.blog/2025/11/11/r...

I mean, one of the movies starts with him literally faking his death and popping out of the coffin after a burial at sea, so there's precedent at least

Ringen: He Must Be a Wizard (Continued from my previous posts.) Some progress, although I confess to looking at the source code for one puzzle; I have absolutely no regrets whatsoever based on what I found. Just to clear up a…

in which the Norwegian game Ringen continues

including outwitting the witch via source code

a meeting with Legolas

Gollum's encounter with the precious

and a confrontation at the Bridge of Khazad-dum

bluerenga.blog/2025/11/10/r...

One thing I love about the history is how it started with a game with almost no Tolkien in it despite HOBBIT in the name. This annoyed someone enough to make their own more Tolkienesque version, but it still wasn’t enough, which annoyed someone else into making a mega-sized version

Ringen: And in the Darkness Bind Them (Continued from my last post, or if you want to read my entire series on this game including when I played it on a MUD, the link here will work.) I’ve done some major exploration of Moria, wh…

Ringen (the first adventure written in Norwegian) continues with a long post where I explore Moria, meet some elves, evade a dragon, fail to correctly solve a riddle, and gather treasures to fund Frodo's upcoming vacation.

bluerenga.blog/2025/11/07/r...

Ringen: Return of the Æons ago, in the pre-pandemic year of 2019, I wrote about the Norwegian game Ringen, based on Lord of the Rings. I only knew about it from a vague reference in a list of Tolkien games which gave th…

Recently, on the Norwegian videogame site spillhistorie.no, two new discoveries were posted, games that were previously lost. I've written about one already; the other discovery was of a very early Tolkien game, and the first original adventure we have in Norwegian.

bluerenga.blog/2025/11/05/r...

Dooooo it

I have far more views on my blog in 2025 than I ever did in their supposed heyday

Search for the Ruby Chalice (1983) Last time I wrote about Polynesian Adventure, an entry into the Falsoft contest for Tandy CoCo adventure games. It was written by an older couple, whereas today’s selection was written by a 1…

All the Adventures continues with Comp 1983 and a contrast with the previous game: despite both games being set on islands, rather than staging "scenes" Search for the Ruby Chalice clearly is trying to simulate an "environment" instead

bluerenga.blog/2025/11/03/s...

Reading @jdyer.bsky.social's recent blog posts playing interactive fiction text adventure game Fairytale (1982). And my mind is blown at the start, learning that this game is based on Enid Blyton's Faraway Tree series of books. Which I adored when I was very young. bluerenga.blog/tag/fairytal...

based on some information on the comments I can say it is confirmed this does in fact use a real indigenous language

it is the earliest use I know of in computer games

Polynesian Adventure: Virtual Vacation (Continued from my last post.) I’ve finished the game. Given it was a 7k-byte type-in, it seemed inevitable, and it turns out there are almost no puzzles, but I had trouble anyway due to a pa…

in which I complete Polynesian Adventure, which is meant to be almost a "virtual tourist" game perhaps 15 years too early

and also maybe the first text in a computer game from an indigenous language, although I have been unable to verify

bluerenga.blog/2025/11/02/p...

Haunted Mansion (1980) John O’Hare finished his trilogy (and, as far I can find, his very last text adventure) with a large dollop of atmosphere. He cut short his process of evolving from a beginner; how many artis…

the game has a small bit of animation, the tree looks normal one from and then mouth and eyes appear

also the author (O'Hare) chimed in his comments the inspiration was "the TV movie Salem’s Lot."

bluerenga.blog/2019/05/15/h...

Polynesian Adventure (1983) This continues the story, more or less, from Rainbow Adventure (1982). I knew I had this particular set of games looming, and since the results of IFComp 2025 were announced a few weeks ago it seem…

IFComp 2025, around since 1995, is (likely) the longest-running videogame creation contest.

Text adventures contests go back to near the beginning: what about Comp 1983?

I start into the games of the Falsoft contest, and the conditions which led to their creation.

bluerenga.blog/2025/11/01/p...

Kinophobia by Bruno Dias Explore a haunted movie studio. Learn the fates of its tormented souls. End a curse inscribed in blood and celluloid.

Ectocomp '25 games are all live no – including KINOPHOBIA, my parser game/database thriller hybrid. Research an alternate history of cinema to figure out the fates of lost souls.

Inspired equally by Return of the Obra Dinn, IMMORTALITY, and Letterboxd.

brunodias.itch.io/kinophobia

The thing to note is the Part I / Part II thing some sellers might not even be clear on

If you look at the side part of the label there's a big Roman numeral

or of course the seller might have tested it (like that Yahoo auction I linked)

Takara Building Adventure Part 1 (1982) The last time I wrote about a Japanese game was with The Palms, where I mentioned skipping over two games from 1982 because there were no copies available. This was one of them. Brief history recap…

1982 was very early for Japanese adventure games, with only a small number of releases. Takara Building Adventure thus is one of the earliest adventure games in Japanese, but it was not generally available...

...until today.

Includes some unexpected history!

bluerenga.blog/2025/10/29/t...

Our first narrative collection: the Andrew Nelson papers | Video Game History Foundation A new archival collection from the writer of the mystery game Titanic: Adventure Out of Time.

Presenting our newest archival collection:

The Andrew Nelson papers, from the writer of the 1996 mystery game Titanic: Adventure Out of Time 🚢

Read more:

one of the reasons Roswell became big is there was some dude in the hospital with a swollen face (for medical reasons)

But hey must be aliens!

Wait where are the ghosts on that one

Fairytale: Bane of Giants (Continued from my previous posts.) I’ve finished the game. This was far more elaborate than I expected and it might verge into a “good” game if some of the dodgier design choices…

the ending of Fairytale, where iconic items swap and meddle in the wrong places

and the game reinforces it is Not for Kids, or at least Not for Kids Playing Alone

bluerenga.blog/2025/10/28/f...

Fairytale: Over the Moon (Continued from my previous post.) “Toffee!” said every one in surprise, “What do you want toffee for?” “To eat, of course,” said Moon-Face. “I just though…

Fairytale continues, with child-appropriate content like cold-blooded murder and a puzzle so outrageous even the authors of Ferret would think it went too far.

bluerenga.blog/2025/10/27/f...

Fairytale (1982) Keith Campbell is well-known amongst a certain circle of adventure enthusiasts as from issue 1 of the UK magazine Computer and Video Games (November 1981) he ran an Adventure column. The column ran…

Next up: the first adventure of Keith Campbell (legendary adventure columnist). This was designed for a team adventure-playing contest and is "for children" (based on books by the children's author Enid Blyton) but is much harder than that designation suggests.

bluerenga.blog/2025/10/26/f...

I really want to see more of what Star Trek 25th Anniversary and Judgment Rites did which is not make “being good” a “choice” but something you have to struggle to work out how to get the desired outcome. Shooting your way through aliens easy to find, being clever and outwitting them harder.

RF Shielding History: When The FCC Cracked Down On Computers The FCC took a hard line on the radio frequency interference that computers created—creating huge headaches for early PC-makers. Why? Blame the CB radio fad.

It’s exciting when someone publishes long-form on a subject you’ve been researching for years.

Here’s a thread commenting on this article in more detail.

If you do the retro computer, read the article & then come back here.

Apologies and respect in advance to @ernie.tedium.co

🧵👇

Deliver the Cake (1981) This is a sequel to a game that I covered 6 years ago, so let’s take things fresh– The People’s Computer Company is an organization important to the history of early computing and…

Next on All the Adventures:

For contrast with the gore of the last game, an entirely conflict-free game written for children in 1981, including a mini-map (extraordinarily rare at the time, but developed here with children in mind).

bluerenga.blog/2025/10/24/d...

I never quite got along with AI Dungeon, but it also never gave me the sense of "AI yuck" the modern systems have

"generative content" rather than slop if that makes sense, even though I ran into plenty of garbled text

maybe the fact it could collapse into garbled text helped

2026 IFTF Microgrant Applications Now Open! You can now apply to our third grant cycle!

Our microgrants program is back for a third year! This year again, IFTF is looking to disburse $3,000 to cool projects related to interactive fiction that could benefit from a little bit of cash. More details on our blog post!