Many years ago, a stagecoach was robbed in this area. The bandits were eventually captures, but one bag of gold coins was never found. Your research has led you to conclude that the coins, by now extremely valuable are hidden somewhere on Moon Mountain. You rented a small shack on the mountain and have just moved in... Your goal in this game is to find and retrieve the treasure in the shortest amount of time.
Published for MS-DOS as public domain, with the invitation to contribute to development costs.
Although originally listed here with a date of 1987, the game is mentioned in a May-June 1986 issue of the Kugram (Kaypro User Group) newsletter; so must have been available least as early as 1986 in some form.
In fact, its origins probably date back to the very early 1980s. Writing on his (now archived) website, the author noted:
This old text adventure game was originally written for the TRS-80, primarily as an exercise in compact programming techniques. It was ported to the IBM PC world in 1984, as one of my first PC programming efforts. It uses a somewhat ugly CGA graphics mode, for no known reason, and is pretty spartan as adventures go.
The Moon Mountain Adventure, in the TRS-80 version, was submitted to Softside Magazine for publication (they printed software listings, which made some sense in days when floppies were expensive and programs were under 16Kb). It was written in interpreted BASIC (of course!) with some Z80 assembly-language subroutines. Softside couldn't decide whether to take it, and ultimately let it slide, though I did sell them other programs before and after that period.
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