{"id":3505,"date":"2006-05-01T19:01:10","date_gmt":"2006-05-02T02:01:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2006\/05\/01\/3505.html"},"modified":"2006-05-01T19:01:10","modified_gmt":"2006-05-02T02:01:10","slug":"spelunker-today-and-easy-sally","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2006\/05\/01\/spelunker-today-and-easy-sally\/","title":{"rendered":"Spelunker Today and Easy Sally"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

One of the many ways I misspent my youth was by playing the original Colossal Cave<\/a> text adventure. A bunch of y'all probably played Zork back in the day, but I always liked Colossal Cave better. Possibly because I played it so much and knew it so well.<\/p>\n

Anyway, I was looking for something in old archived files today and I came across a reference to the game, and it occurred to me that I could use the power of the Web to find more information about something I've long wondered about.<\/p>\n

In the original (350-point) version of the game, there's a certain place where you find some issues of Spelunker Today<\/cite> magazine. If you try to read the magazines, you're told: \"I'm afraid the magazine is written in dwarvish.\"<\/p>\n

But in one of the first two versions I played (either the Logical Business Machines version or the version on the Stanford computers, in the late 1970s or early 1980s), you could find a Dwarvish\/English dictionary elsewhere in the caves. And if you read the magazine with the dictionary on hand, there was a poem that provided hints for the game.<\/p>\n

The only bits that I remember went something like this (Note: Spoilers for the game here):<\/p>\n\n

\n
\n

[something something], take my advice<\/p>\n

Say Giant words and go there twice;<\/p>\n

You may believe my words are droll,<\/p>\n

But that's the way to fool the troll.<\/p>\n

If maze-confusion is in your head,<\/p>\n

Remember: Easy Sally says she never even entertains newly-weds.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/lj-cut>\n

I thought at the time that this was a standard part of the game, but no subsequent version that I've encountered includes the poem. (Though there is another version that includes the dictionary, and gives you a couple paragraphs of non-hint prose when you read the magazines with the dictionary's help.)<\/p>\n

So, on the off chance that there's someone out there who knows something more about this: drop me a note! I'm curious as to (a) what the whole poem said, (b) who wrote it, and (c) which version of the game it was in.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the many ways I misspent my youth was by playing the original Colossal Cave text adventure. A bunch…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[58],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3505","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-games"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3505","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3505"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3505\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3505"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3505"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3505"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}