Thread by @rickbrewPDN

Here's the story of a game I made in 1994, when I was 12, that somehow -- like some kind of lost, drunken cat -- finally found its way home on Christmas Eve after 25 years.

THE GOLDEN FLUTE IV: THE FLUTE OF IMMORTALITY

cc @Macaw45 and @textfiles

Here's a link into @macaw45's Twitch stream where he played the game two days ago: twitch.tv/videos/5255543…

And here's a link to an HTML hosted DOSBox where you can play it yourself: archive.org/details/msdos_…

(warning: it's not very good 😂)

"I'm not gonna delete it" -- @macaw45's glowing review after playing for 10 amazing minutes (at approximately 5h:27m:50s in the Twitch stream)

The Golden Flute IV is supposed to be some kind of RPG set in a magical fantasy kingdom. You're the hero, you have stats, a sword, and gold coins that you use to buy potions, armor, and spells.

You wander around a randomly generated map and fight monsters that randomly pop up, Final Fantasy style. Eventually you find the randomly placed final boss, "The Robed Figure", and you kill him. And then you're done. And that's it. That's literally all there is to it!

Some tips:

Press F1 and Alt+F1 for help and keyboard commands, and read the GF4.DOC text file w/ backstory and other goofiness.

"Retreat" is often the best option in a fight. Otherwise it's way harder than Dark Souls. No attempts were made at "balancing" the game 😁

The game is based on "The Golden Flute" text adventure game from Delton T. Horn's 1984 book, "Golden Flutes & Great Escapes: How to Write Your Own Adventure Games" (C64 edition pictured)

It's an easy read and includes stories for 4 games, source code, flow charts, and discussion on how everything fits together. If you have access to a BASIC interpreter, the book probably still holds up well if you want to learn or teach programming.

I completely DEVOURED this book, reading it cover to cover and typing in all the code for the included games. After which, of course, I made modifications ...

... and I made SEQUELS!

The Golden Flute 2 and 3 do exist, somewhere, hopefully, on a disk in the attic. It has "BREW SOFTWARE GAMES" scribbled onto it, and it has all the little BASIC games I made for my Tandy 1000 HX when I was 10/11 years old.

(not my cat)

You see, I was a BIG fan of Sierra games, and I slowly acquired almost all of them, dusty and used, mostly from Half Price Books & Software. The folks at Sierra were my heroes, their games filled up my shelves and fueled my imagination.

(Later, in a moment of unprecedented stupidity, I let my mom throw them all away when I moved out after college. She asked what to do with them ... I said toss them out. I REALLY regret that!)

I made my own primitive imitations of their games, like "Royal Quest" and "Solar Quest". They were silly, goofy text adventures that I sometimes added badly drawn static graphics to. I imagined I was running my own game studio like Sierra.

The Hero's Quest series, aka Quest for Glory, ended up being my favorite. The Golden Flute 4 takes some inspiration from it. You can see that in its use of the word "Hero" and in the "Choose Your Hero" screen, and in the monster battles.

(btw, the Thief is supposed to be a picture of someone pickpocketing a wallet 😂)

I had a really weird, goofy sense of humor as a kid, which was loudly apparent in anything I wrote. You can see this in the "story page" for the game, and definitely in the GF4.DOC in the game files. (And also in everything else in the game)

It's VERY surprising to me that anyone found this game, let alone played it. I wrote the game on a Tandy 1000 TL/2, an 8MHz 286 that I bought with scraps of money I earned from my paper route. I had no Internet, not until 1996 or 1997. No network card, no modem.

(not my photo)

I only have hazy memories of making this game. Just scribbling into some stone age paint program, lots of awful Turbo Pascal 4.5 code full of single-letter variable names, and stealing sound FX and music from other shareware games like Jill of the Jungle (pictured).

I must've worked on it for at least 6 months, judging from the timestamps on files in the ZIP file. Basically whenever I wasn't playing games like Hero's Quest and when I should've been doing homework. I was terrible at school because I didn't care; I did fine in college though.

I didn't have a plan, schedule, or anything. There was no audience, no grind, no target market. I just scribbled on it here and there and I guess I figured it was done at some point. It was my masterpiece!

(real screenshot from GF4 intro/credits!)

So here's why I'm so amazed this turned up again: I made ONE installable copy onto 3.5" 720K disks that I packaged up and mailed to my cousin on the east coast, and that's it. I never heard back from him about it, and then my hard drive crashed and I lost the whole thing.

Years later, in college, I e-mailed my cousin to ask if he still had a copy of it because I had lost mine. No response. I guess he was busy.

It was gone. Oh well ... I moved on :) I hadn't really thought about it for 20 years.

So you can imagine my surprise when, yesterday, I received two simultaneous tweets asking if I had written "The Golden Flute 4" ... I honestly had no idea how this could have even happened because it should've been impossible!

My best guess is that my cousin did upload it to a BBS somewhere (he was active on BBS's) and just forgot about it.

Apparently it was found in the "Frostbyte" archive, basically hundreds of disks purchased from a BBS owner who lived in L.A.

archive.org/details/frostb…

And then I guess, sometime later, Jason Scott (@textfiles) uploaded it to archive.org as part of the "Frostbyte Shareware Collection" archive.org/details/softwa…

@textfiles I'd like to end with:

"STATISTIIIIICS!!!"

(if you saw the Twitch stream...)

Apparently breaking & entering is a "serious felony" and punishable by execution without a trial in this universe ¯\_(ツ)_/¯