Desert

Desert is a text survival game for the IBM PC from 1982, released by International PC Owners. It is written in BASIC and belongs to the very first wave of software for IBM's personal computer, back when graphics meant characters on a line and a whole game fitted onto a few pages of listing.

The task is simple and unforgiving. You sit on a camel, some forty miles of desert lie ahead of you and a group of pursuers who never rest is behind. You manage two things: the water in your canteen and the strength of the animal. Each turn you decide whether to drive the camel at full speed, move more carefully, stop and let it recover, or take a drink. Water runs down, the camel tires, and the distance behind you shrinks. Whatever you choose, you give something up, and that is the whole of the appeal.

That is what the game rests on, and it is fair to say there is nothing more to it. No story, no characters, no map. Just numbers, short messages on the screen and a random hand that sometimes deals you an oasis and sometimes a sandstorm. A round lasts a few minutes and you usually lose because you took one unnecessary risk.

Today this is mainly a piece of history. Anyone who has met the BASIC type-ins of the seventies and eighties, the Camel and Oregon Trail school, will recognise the skeleton at once: short decisions, hard arithmetic and no mercy at all. As entertainment for a long evening it does not stand up for a second; as a look at what game software was at the very start of the PC era it is an instructive ten minutes.

On oldgame.cz you can start it right in the browser, with nothing to install.