Halls of Death

Reston Publishing 1984

Language:: English
Authors:: Jack B. Hardy
Platforms:: Atari 400/800
Genres:: Fantasy, misc., Magic, Treasure hunt, Type-in
Entered by:: Garry
Added:: 27-08-2015
Edited:: 29-08-2015

Synopsis

Plot

Your objective is to explore the halls of death to find an invisible golden treasure chest and return it to your starting location. Obviously, you can't find something that's invisible, so you have to find an unspecified magic item to make it visible, but in order to find that you will need to find...

You get the idea, right? This is pretty standard adventuring fare in an underground fantasy world populated by wizards, giants, dragons and a fish!

Notes

This adventure was originally published in Adventures with the Atari by Jack B. Hardy. It is unusual, in that it is written in Atari Microsoft BASIC and is probably the only Atari adventure ever published in that language (most adventures being written in Atari BASIC, assembly language or one of the various adventure writing systems).

Pages 37 to 74 present the program in fragments, along with explanations of what's going on for budding adventure programmers. If you enter the lines of BASIC code as presented, you will have to delete some of the lines and re-enter different lines as the explanation progresses. This is a real pain if you just want to play the game. In this case, the full program listing is presented on pages 251 to 265.

Unfortunately, both the fragmented and full listings are missing two lines. The missing lines cause a UL (undefined line) error when you try to DIG, so that it is impossible to complete the game. To fix this, add the following lines: