The History of TreasureQuest Normally, you would expect to find a listing of the updates and bug-fixes that went into each new version of the game in a history file. Instead, since this is the first release of the game, I'm going to give you a *real* history of the game. Note: All products mentioned are trademarks, copyrights, or whatever of whichever company made them. :) 1983: In 1983, Joe got his first computer. It was an Atari 400 Home Computer. You may remember that it had a membrane keyboard, 16K of RAM, and 10K of ROM. Our mass storage was a tape drive. This meant that it was usually a gamble whether the program actually saved when we told it to save. But, it was our first experience with a computer, so it seemed wonderful to us. Will and I were avid role-players, and decided to try to capture some of the feeling of a role-playing game on the computer. We sat down with the Atari BASIC cartridge inserted, and came up with TreasureQuest. No, it wasn't at all like it is now. That was not possible in 16K. What we did come up with was a no-frills combat game that we ended up playing more frequently than would be expected. The game consisted of an endless dungeon containing various monsters. When the game was run, your character was the same every time. There was no way to save your character and continue your quest at a later time. Nor was there any way for your character to advance in levels. You could have any type of character you wanted, so long as it was a Warrior. There was also no town. Each room had a monster tied to it, rather than randomly generating a room description for each monster. This made the room descriptions much more suited to the monsters, but it also made it more monotonous (ie, every single ghoul was digging at a grave when you encountered it). The combat system was lackluster as well. The only choices were "F)ight, R)un, V)ial". Hit locations were not used, nor were shields. A roll to was made to determine whether an attack hit, and if it did then damage was done, as there was no armor absorbtion. After combat, the player immediately got whatever treasure the monster had. There was no "post-combat" menu. The next room just automatically appeared. The only way to heal damage was to find a vial as treasure, or to encounter the "vial room". The "vial room" was exactly as it is now: a room with a vial on a table. There's a 50-50 chance that the vial is poison or cure potion. It would depend where the player's character was in hit points at the moment whether the risk was worth it. Even with these limitations, the game was fun. We played it for hours and hours. 1984: Joe got rid of the Atari 400, and got a brand new 1200XL with a 1050 Disk Drive. We loaded TQ from the tape drive and saved it on the disk. Since the 1200XL had 64K of RAM, we were able to make some changes in the game. We added more monsters. We made it possible to win the game, as there was a small chance that any given room would be the "Dragon Room". Beat the Dragon, and the game was won. No other changes were made to this version. 1986: Joe sold the 1200XL and purchased an Apple //c. Since this machine had 128K of RAM, and he had purchased an extra disk drive for it (for a total of two including the one built in to the machine), it was possible to vastly improve the game. Using some brilliant software from Beagle Brothers Software, it was possible to have many AppleBASIC modules of the game, and still retain all the global variables when switching from one module to another. In this way, the game grew to have a town, three character classes, hit locations, and most of the things you see in the present version. The only thing that was not added to the Apple version was the armor absorbtion, the Tavern, and the Palaestra. This time it was a much more enjoyable game than ever before, and Joe and Will were known to sit for hours working to get a character to the highest levels. 1990: Joe and Will each buy an 80386SX-16 based computer in 1989. Soon, each has a bulletin board running. Looking at the door games available for bulletin boards, they realize that TreasureQuest would fit right in. They begin programming it in Borland's Turbo C++, eventually getting to version .500, the first version to be Beta Tested by the local users. Version .600 was released a few months before Joe took his board down and moved to Illinois. The game had not been generally released to the public, having only been run on the BBSs run by the two authors. 1993: Joe began collecting Atari artifacts in 1992. He now has most of them, and decides to put together the best system he can and attempt TreasureQuest once again. Using OSS Software's BASIC XE on the Atari 130XE, he comes up with the basic game very quickly, having programmed it so many times before. This time, he adds the armor absorbtion to the combat system, leaving everything else intact. 1994: In February, Joe put his BBS back on-line. By March, he was ready to pull the BBS version of TreasureQuest out of the archives and start working on it again. In time, the Tavern was added, Wizards and Clerics were added, and the new armor absorbtion system was put in place. By mid-May, Joe was satisfied that the game was beyond any point it had ever been at on any platform: he was moving ahead at last! Next, Joe added the Tavern, which provided gambling and groveling, which are simply a couple of ways for players to get some extra gold without going into the dungeon. Finally, Joe added the Palaestra, which provides a way for players to test their strength against eachother. While Will did not have his BBS running at the time, he did call in and try out the game often, and offer his opinions on the direction game development should take. Carole, the person who Joe left California for, used her talents as an ANSI artist to create opening ANSI drawings for the game. She also helped make the text color schemes more pleasing to the eye. At last, the prototypical text game had a splash of graphics! This brings us to version .900. As new versions come out beyond that, they will be listed in the traditional manner below the foregoing history.