Explore a haunted house, find treasure and escape the house with your life
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
The link to the author's page is broken.
It's here:
https://laird.engin.umich.edu/haunt/
Updated the link. Thanks.
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.
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.
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.