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Haunt

John Laird 1979

Language:
English
Authors:
John Laird
Platforms:
Mainframe info
Genres:
Treasure hunt
Entered by:
dave, Gunness, Strident
Added:
11-12-2010
Edited:
05-12-2020

Synopsis

Explore a haunted house, find treasure and escape the house with your life

Notes

Was written in OPS4 (a lisp derived language) for a DEC-10 computer. A partial port is available for OPS5.

The author has a page about the game.

[+] Users who have solved this game

[+] Users currently playing this game

Images

Image
haunt.png Haunt_Bas_s_Father.png Haunt_Two.png Haunt.png

Rating

Average User Rating: — (0 rating)

Your Rating: —

User Comments

Jonathan O (04-12-2020 21:57)

The link to the author's page is broken.

ahope1 (05-12-2020 02:30)

It's here:
https://laird.engin.umich.edu/haunt/

Strident (05-12-2020 11:08)

Updated the link. Thanks.

Canalboy (17-03-2023 22:16)

I had a discourse via e-mail with the author some years ago. Some of the puzzles relate to television programmes from his childhood. Sadly the lack of a save game feature renders it frustrating to play.

Canalboy (03-08-2024 11:27)

Thanks to Big Dan Hallock who sent me a working copy of PDP-10 I have been able to add Jimmy Maher's TOPS-10-in-a-box and run this in my Windows 10 environment. It is CPU intensive (using around 25% of the CPU capability) but it runs smoothly. I have around a dozen emulators on my home system ranging from an HP3000 to Vice for the Commodore 64 and the only other emulator that really chews up resources is RPCEmu for the Archimedes RISC environment.

Thanks to the sterling efforts of various people out there it is possible to play almost any legacy software nowadays on a multiplicity of environments.

Canalboy (31-08-2024 13:39)

It is possible to escape the mansion at any time by performing the right action in the right place. An engagingly wacky game which suffers from its reliance on knowledge of 1950s and 1960s US childrens' television and comic culture to solve some of the problems. A save game feature would have helped the play experience (although you can continue to wander in some locations after your demise) and John himself tells me he feels the game design could be improved upon.

Still, it plays very smoothly and I found no bugs at all. And any game which features an underwater moose replete with snorkel, aqualung and flippers is only to be commended.

A very interesting and fun piece of early text adventure arcana and worth the effort of fiddling with TOPS-10 and the DEC-10 emulator to play it.