The author's comments, from the Atari Age forums:
I wrote this game when I was 14 or so, and I was playing with trying to write a parser that was flexible like the Infocom ones. (It's not as smart, obviously, but since it just looks for keywords it's slightly more flexible than the old verb/noun parsers). And the idea came while I was crawling under a road through a frozen drainage ditch with my friends.
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