Colossal Cave Adventure remake from Ken & Roberta Williams

[Boleskine]

"It seemed more romantic in Demolition Man."
"Let's try the three seashells again."

 

[Taluntain]

Jaw-droppin' good!

- Ken & Roberta Williams

 

[Boleskine]

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022...-up-about-their-first-video-game-in-25-years/

Roberta and Ken Williams open up about their first video game in 25 years
No fear of Colossal failure: "If this game sinks, it ain't gonna change our life at all."
Sam Machkovech - 4/8/2022, 11:01 AM

Enlarge / Roberta Williams and Ken Williams at the 2022 Game Developers Conference.
Sam Machkovech
SAN FRANCISCO—Legendary game programmer Ken Williams needed only a moment to chew on my question. He and equally famed game designer Roberta Williams had set themselves up for the query by recounting a principle from their time at Sierra On-Line, the video game company they founded that revolutionized PC gaming in the 1980s and '90s.

Sierra games, they said, stood out because they were built "with blinders" from the rest of the games industry. Nobody worked at competitors' companies; nobody played competitors' games. And after each Sierra game's release, its individual sales record would determine the budget and scope of the lead designer's next game.

I asked how that math works for their new, out-of-nowhere game announcement in March 2022, Colossal Cave 3D. This reimagining of the first text adventure, the one that Roberta eventually modded into her classic 1980 game Mystery House, is about as detached from her designs in Sierra's heyday as it can be, mostly due to its shift into (optional) hand-controlled VR adventuring. Does Sierra's founding principle about budgets and production scope still apply if a lead designer's "last game" launched over 20 years ago?

Ken paused for a beat, then made a wholly different point. And he isn't necessarily wearing blinders about the game industry's modern view of classic game makers.

"I've seen where Sierra alumni and others have made a comeback and have done kind of a less-than-perfect game," Ken said. "And we don't want to do that. We’d rather throw it in the garbage than do something that ain’t—"

Here Roberta interrupted, as she was apt to do in our conversation, by saying, "It has to be good."

"It's got to be good," Ken agreed.

Much more at the link.

 

[Blackthorne]

Well, hey guys. Talk about weird things.

Ken Williams emailed me last night, told me to call him.

Long story short, I'm now working on Colossal Cave 3D Adventure. I'm starting next week, so, I guess I'll have some insight into this.

 

[<3sRichardSimmons]

Well, hey guys. Talk about weird things.

Ken Williams emailed me last night, told me to call him.

Long story short, I'm now working on Colossal Cave 3D Adventure. I'm starting next week, so, I guess I'll have some insight into this.

Glad to hear you’re on the team Steve! Hope you get to have some real input and fun on the project and springboard it into the Williams funding QFI2!

And worst case scenario you’ll at least get a paycheck and a cool story.

 

[Blackthorne]

Glad to hear you’re on the team Steve! Hope you get to have some real input and fun on the project and springboard it into the Williams funding QFI2!

And worst case scenario you’ll at least get a paycheck and a cool story.

Yeah, it'll be nice to have a steady paycheck for some time here - and contribute to the project. I haven't seen a whole lot, but what I've got through this weekend is pretty neat. Hopefully I can help this game be the best that it can be. On a personal level, Ken & Roberta have been very cool so far.

 

[Outlander]

Congratulations Blackthorne!!! You more than deserve it

 

[Boleskine]

Just a summary of everything thus far:

 

[OndrejSc]

 

[jfrisby]

Updated website and trailer: https://www.colossalcave3d.com/

 

[OndrejSc]

Looks like it runs on Woodoo 2.

 

[Rincewind]

Updated website and trailer: https://www.colossalcave3d.com/

I like what I'm seeing so far.

 

[Boleskine]

I like how this project started with a site called "Ken's Game" then evolved into "Reimagined by Roberta Williams."

IIRC Ken has said in some interviews that after early development Roberta basically stepped in and said, "Move over, old man. If you're going to put our names on this thing it needs to not be rubbish."

 

[Rincewind]

IIRC Ken has said in some interviews that after early development Roberta basically stepped in and said, "Move over, old man. If you're going to put our names on this thing it needs to not be rubbish."

Sounds fair, after all he started out as a programmer, then became a business person / manager. But he's not exactly the creative game designer type, that has always been his wife.

 

[OndrejSc]

Did you just assume their genders?

 

[Korgoth of Barbaria]

As a major Sierra fan, I can’t see I’m interested in this game

 

[Boleskine]

Will Lady Gaga also be writing an original song for Colossal Cave 3D?

 

[Blackthorne]

Hey, as a major Sierra fan who IS working on this game... it's pretty cool. Honestly, it reminds me of what we did when we remade KQIII/SQ2. Those were games we loved and wanted to pay homage to. Colossal Cave is THE game that got Roberta into all this - she'd play it on a teletype that Ken brought home from work in the late 70s. After beating it, she said she wanted more and Ken was like "Uh, there really isn't more..." so she sat down and wrote out the idea for Mystery House. Ken wrote the damn tools to display rudimentary graphics to her text, came up with the parser command input... and they had Mystery House.

This is Roberta remaking the game that she loved... and in playing it (a LOT, let me tell you - my main job is playing it, testing for bugs, accuracy, etc.) it is incredibly faithful to the original text adventure. You could/can use a walkthrough of the original to navigate around this.... but it's a fully explorable world. I mean, the "cobble crawl" part in the original is like two "screens" of text, but the first time I played it on this, I got lost in the twists and turns and found my way around, exploring and finding the items to collect there. It's a pretty cool experience. She's had her hand in every piece of this - It's been cool working with her, and seeing how her creative ideas dovetail with Ken's technical expertise. I mean, this dude has been coding and using computers for fifty freakin' years. He taught himself Unity for this, and he's coded a lot of this himself. We have a pretty big team now, and the artists they hired to create the environments are great. I've had a blast being a small part of it... for those who are into the whole VR thing, it is kinda cool to strap on the headset and walk around in this environment - I've mainly been testing the PC builds of it, but I've been working more on the VR headset the past two weeks too and it's a cool experience.

If you're a classic adventure fan, I think you'll appreciate how they've made a classic adventure game experience in a 3D environment. The control system is familar to those who've played P&C adventures, but I think pretty much anyone can navigate it. For the record, I've been playing and testing with both my Mouse (and Keyboard, WASD for movement) and a gamepad, and it works pretty well. There's a lot of touches in this that will have you say "Yep, classic Roberta Williams." And there are deaths. You can (and I have, many times) fallen to my death in the caves!

The team rages in ages too - there's younger people on the team who didn't grow up with Sierra games, and then there are folks like me who were steeped in this before they were even born. We're basically in the polish phase now, taking the next several months to shine this up and get it ready for release and it's looking good. The trailer shows some pretty cool sections, but we're trying to keep a lot of stuff in it under wraps until release. So, I hope people enjoy it - know that I've personally put a lot of hours into it the last few months and I'll continue to do so.

 

[Boleskine]

Lengthy interview with Ken and Roberta:

https://www.colossalcave3d.com/2022...k-about-their-past-and-future-in-video-games/

I thought this part was funny.

Luke: Have you spoken with the game’s original creator, William Crowther, about your project?

Ken: Nope. I would love to. I tried to reach him but couldn’t. I did speak with Don Woods. Don was polite and encouraging but also seemed kind of burnt out on people talking to him about the game. I think that when we spoke, he didn’t really think I’d deliver on building a product. I do hope that he and Will Crowther will play this game someday. Roberta and I owe our success to them, and a large reason for doing this game is to honor them. We are treating the game with the utmost respect and want our version of the game to bring another fifty years of life to their creation.

Roberta: No, [neither] Ken nor I have talked to Will Crowther. Ken spoke to Don Woods. I asked Ken, “Did Don Woods even know who you were or who I was?” He said, “You know he didn’t seem like he knew or even cared.” Ken got the impression that he had gone on to other things and probably didn’t even know why we had such an interest in Colossal Cave. I could be wrong on that.

Another interview from a VR site:

https://www.colossalcave3d.com/2022/07/20/colossal-cave-the-interview/

 

[Arrowgrab]

Hey, as a major Sierra fan who IS working on this game... it's pretty cool.

So, since you're an insider...
Will there an item the size of a single pixel in the second room without which you can't finish the game, and which you can't go back for once you miss it? Just for the old authentic Sierra experience?

 

[Korgoth of Barbaria]

To be honest I find this depressing. They’re 68 and 69 years of age now. I’m sure they enjoyed it, and that’s their right, but as a fan they spent 26 years doing nothing but boating. What games we could’ve had if they had stayed in the industry

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

Ken and Roberta Williams retired from the industry shortly before the market for adventure games collapsed. Seems to have been quite propitious timing for them.

 

[<3sRichardSimmons]

I mean, I like the Williamses and I like (most) of Roberta's games, but she was nowhere near the best designer in her field.

By getting out when they did they really effectively played a market crash; if they had stayed in they would have lost everything.

Gotta respect that.

 

[Boleskine]

Another round of previews/hype coming up?

 

[Blackthorne]

Hey, as a major Sierra fan who IS working on this game... it's pretty cool.

So, since you're an insider...
Will there an item the size of a single pixel in the second room without which you can't finish the game, and which you can't go back for once you miss it? Just for the old authentic Sierra experience?

Of course. It's literally in the very first room. It's on the main menu, in fact. If you don't click on it, you can't complete the game.