Sometime in the mid-to-late 80s, my brothers and I got hooked on a very early text adventure game called “Camel”. The premise is that you’re fleeing across the desert on a camel, being chased by “pygmies.”

I don’t recall how we obtained the game; I do remember loading it from a floppy disk, but I’m not sure whether we bought the disk preloaded or if someone typed it in from a magazine, but we played it enough times that some of the program’s outputs have been a running joke in my family for decades.

The line “Your camel thanks you” (displayed when the player chose to stop for the night) came up again this weekend. This inspired me to see if I could find the BASIC program online.