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.
A blog post from 2016 led me to a version preserved in the WayBack machine. I’ve not done a line-for-line comparison, but this appears to be the same version that appears on Atari Archives from David Ahl’s book More Basic Computer Games (also available via the Internet Archive).
My immediate goal was to put a playable version of the game online so I could send the link to my brothers. And if you’ve read this far, here’s the result.
My first thought was to rewrite the program into JavaScript myself. BASIC is simple enough to understand, but restructuring it to get rid of all the GOTOs and making sense of all the single-character variable names … that was more work than I wanted to do.
So I handed the program to claude.ai.
All I really wanted was the simple “screen full of text” I remembered from way back, so I instructed Claude to just create a giant output area on the screen.
Claude “recognized” the game as “Camel” and of its own volition created a web page with green text on a black background, reminiscent of an old CRT display (even older than what I played the game on).
I instructed the AI to make two changes. First, to preserve the user’s input next to the prompt. Second, to fix a bug where loading the page on a phone caused a print dialog to appear. (Claude had created a function named print which conflicted with the browser’s print function — it’s somewhat surprising this bug didn’t occur on the desktop browser as well.)
The resulting game plays much as I remember the original.
I haven’t heard from my brothers since I sent them the link. Hopefully they made it to an oasis where their camels are filling their canteens and eating figs.
(Cover image of a camel racing across the desert, generated via Bing Create.)