Coupled with a recent Ask Slashdot question and my recent visit to visit the house named Cypress, my boyhood home, I've been thinking about the Adventure Construction Set a bit.

Back when I was a youngster, my parents relented and bought me Stuart Smith's Adventure Construction Set (ACS) for my Commodore 64. ACS included the tools to create your own top-down, tile-based RPGs, from the individual graphics all the way up to the story and ultimate goals. The detail, for a kid my age, was boggling and sucked me in for hours and hours. I can still remember creating graphics, items that I'd later call ego weapons, after my time with Angband, and writing little story bits to go with them. The set of included graphics, from which to start, was itself a tremendous gift. What today would have been broken into expansion packs (no doubt sold separately for $19.99) back then was part for the course: fantasy graphics, science fiction graphics, and even Bondian spy graphics. And it didn't stop there, as items and enemies were included for each of those genres. As if that weren't enough, Smith had created his own bloody gigantic adventure, Rivers of Light, with ACS and you could tear it apart to see how it worked.

While just being home is enough to make me think of my childhood years, I was struck in particular by a specific memory while mowing the grass. During the hot summer months, the mowing of our yard was my job and mine alone. I recall, many times, setting up my humble Commodore 64 and a blank floppy disk and ACS and letting the system run with yet another brilliant feature of the software: the ability to create an adventure randomly, letting the computer create the maps and lay out the enemies, and set an overall simple goal, as well as some simple text messages at various points to guide you along. After tweaking various parameters to determine the size and difficulty of the adventure, the system announced a final time until it was done and could be left alone until it finished. I'd set up the electric fan so that it blew across the system, especially the black plastic brick power supply which tended to overheat on hot days, and head out to mow the grass. Upon finishing the grass, I'd check to see if the system completed without incident, since occasionally the heat would overwhelm the system or I'd get a bad blank floppy and the system would hang, and then head out for a quick swim in the river. All swum out and appropriately showered, I'd settle in front of my keyboard and begin hacking away at the new adventure created for me by my brown breadbox computer and disappear for a few hours.

Sure, the system didn't know how to create epic adventures like Rivers of Light. Sure, the item you were after often turned out to be something silly, like a magic small shield. But that simple random system and my own imagination, which filled in the illogical gaps along the way, was a wonderful thing in my youth and made the lonely hours of mowing and raking and trimming worth every minute.

As I again mowed that same yard this very weekend, I realized that I don't have all those things anymore. That particular Commodore 64 long ago succumbed to static electricty from my fingers through the ill-placed joystick ports right beside the power switch. That old 1541 disk drive probably got sold or given away. I do have replacement hardware: a JiffyDOS-enabled Commodore 128 with a JD-ed 1571 and a CMD FD-2000 along with a great non-black-plastic-brick power supply. I even have my original ACS disk, and floppies to play with. What I don't have any more is the time to spend really digging into that kind of tool and making an epic adventure. Damn...I want my childhood back.

Final thought: Maybe I'm completely crazy here, but I would venture to say that a dedicated developer could take that same system, dress it up in modern amenities, and sell a million copies. I think there is a great system there, just begging to be made.