From Gary Bedrosian, author of Empire of the Overmind, G.F.S. 
Sorceress and Lords of Karma
January 20th, 2002

I played many of the early text adventure games on Apple, Atari, 
and TRS-80. Remember Zork and Scott Adams games?  (Of course you 
do.)  It was like listening to a story on the radio -- you had to 
use your imagination to make the pictures in your mind.  I liked 
those games and wanted to try my hand at it.

Before I had any of those commercial 8-bit computers, I built 
myself an 8-bit S-100 bus system from a kit.  It wasn't an 
Altair, but an Altair clone from a company called IMSAI.  I 
eventually bought a 5.25 inch floppy drive for it from a company 
called North Star.  The floppy drive came with a version of Basic 
thrown in for free.  It wasn't as good as Microsoft's version, 
but it was no extra cost.  For a terminal, I started out with a 
converted TV set and a surplus keyboard.  Eventually I switched 
to a Heathkit video terminal.

So having what for the time was a fairly good system, I wanted to 
try to write an adventure game. The only trouble with that idea 
was that most people didn't have what I had, so I knew if I 
wanted to reach a wide audience, I had to make it run on Apple, 
Atari, and TRS-80.  The answer to my problem was a shareware 
program called Tiny Pascal.  It was a very compact compiler (it 
had to be for a computer limited to less than 64 kilobytes of 
memory) designed for the 8080 or Z80 microprocessor.  Best of 
all, we had the source code for Tiny Pascal in Tiny Pascal 
itself.  So a friend and I modified Tiny Pascal so that we could 
cross-compile into 6502 microprocessor code for the Apple and 
Atari.  The TRS-80 was a Z80 system so that wasn't a problem.

Using Tiny Pascal, I wrote a very small adventure core that could 
handle text messages, parsing user input, and manipulating 
objects (matches, doors, swords, etc.) based on object tables.  
Remember, everything had to fit into memory, so we wrote another 
program that compressed text in a way that was fast to decompress 
on the fly, so we could store approximately 3 characters in every 
2 bytes.  In the final adventure game, everything including 
program, the text messages, and data describing the objects had 
to fit into less than 64 kilobytes of memory.

The first adventure game I tried with this system was Lords of 
Karma, 1978. Looking back, it was an interesting learning 
experience, but it wasn't all that much fun for anyone else to 
play it. I revamped the adventure core to be more flexible in 
handling objects, allow more "alive" seeming creatures to inhabit 
the world, and move around by passing through "portal" objects 
("FOLLOW PATH" or "GO DOOR" etc.) rather than the traditional 
N,S,E,W,U,D.
Then in a burst of creativity I created Empire of the Overmind, 
1979, which is the best game of any type that I even invented.

After that, I tried my hand at another adventure game, G.F.S. 
Sorceress, 1980.  It was a science fiction game using the exact 
same game engine, but it just lacked a certain something.  I did 
like the beginning of the game, though, where you have been 
thrown out of the airlock of a spaceship and you're stranded 
literally in the middle of nothing.

A few years later, having found that I wasn't going to be making 
a living at computer games, I went to work for a large company.  
I got an IBM PC and I thought it would be nice to port Empire of 
the Overmind to that.  I didn't care about the other two 
adventure games I wrote.  So I reworked my adventure engine and 
made a little bit nicer user interface, and extended a few things 
now that I could fit a bigger game.  But the days of text 
adventures were over and Empire of the Overmind was largely 
forgotten. This was around 1983.  The IBM PC version sat in a box 
on my shelf for about 15 years until I decided to make it 
available when I built my web site. Sadly,
I have lost most of the source code.  In fact, when I went to 
play it to make sure it worked, I found I had forgotten several 
of the secrets.  I had to remember how I compressed the text 
messages and then I actually extracted all of the text from 
inside the program to give myself hints how to win!
That's what 15 years will do to your memory.

By the way, I believe the IBM PC version is greatly expanded over 
the Apple, Atari, and TRS-80 versions, so my hints and solution 
for the IBM PC won't be exactly the same as for the others.  I 
consider the IBM PC version to be my "Director's Cut" version.

Gary's current site is located at:
http://users.wsg.net/bedrosian/games.htm