Piracy 1.0

In 1984 I was an avid INFOCOM game player with a serious need to program games on my Commodore 64. I bought my Commodore 64 specifically because I could write games in BASIC that were fun and functional. I chose the C64 because it had all the capabilities to create an example game I chose - Q*Bert. It had sprites, sound, and a good character set that allowed me to make a game board. In 1984 I wrote my own take on a version of Q*Bert, called BOXXY which had a level editor and other fun features, written entirely in BASIC and was fun to play.

Around the same time I was immersed in several excellent early INFOCOM games such as Infidel and Starcross. My first game purchase ever was Suspended, but I had a hard time getting used to that one. Not long after, I finished Infidel and Starcross and played and finished many INFOCOM games since, loving them all. I was particularly taken with Planetfall and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, having read the first three books in 1984.

But at the time I wanted to write an adventure game of my own, so I came up with a story, created a space ship map, and began programming.

In BASIC.

With a two-word parser.

Ick.

But Piracy 1.0 was born. It wasn't called 1.0 at the time of course, because 2.0 didn't exist until now.

The game was admittedly an homage to Hitchhiker, in that it had humor in it, or what I'd like to think was humor. But the premise was based on the pirating of a space ship under your control. The premise was very similar to this one, without a lot of the detail. You were tasked to take a dreaded pirate to trial, and were caught by his crew who boarded your ship and killed your crew. Thinking you'd be useful they tossed you in the Brig where you woke up.

Of course my game was a bit simple. You woke up in the Brig with a convenient screwdriver in your possession in order to open a panel that would allow you out. But it wasn't bad.

And the ship's computer sounded awfully similar to Eddie the Shipboard Computer.

The basic premise was the same, though, and included roaming pirates you could shoot, which could shoot you, block you from leaving the room you're in, and possibly killing you.

The game took up so much of the BASIC memory space in my C64 that I had to optimize my BASIC code using various utility programs available at the time. I eventually used a BASIC compiler which not only sped the response time up (which was important since I wrote my own text input routine) but also shrunk the code down to fit more comfortably into the memory space.

I uploaded the game to Quantumlink, and recently a friend sent me a copy formatted in the VICE Commodore Emulator, so I was able to play it again and even read the source code.

Piracy ©1985,2008 Sean Huxter