Urban Upstart

Urban Upstart is a text adventure from 1983, written by Pete Cooke and published by Richard Shepherd Software; this release runs on the Commodore 64. The premise is unusually down to earth for its day, and funnier for it: no dragons, no dungeons, just an escape from the grim British town of Scunthorpe, which the game portrays with merciless irony.

In 1983 text adventures were the showcase genre of home computing — graphics were expensive in memory, words were free. You type commands, read descriptions, and assemble both the map and your escape plan in your head. Urban Upstart brought satire into the form: instead of heroic quests, you contend with rent, the police and the hazards of ordinary life.

Pete Cooke went on to become one of the most respected British programmers of the eighties, and his early adventures show how he earned it — economical, precise writing and a sharp eye for detail. The humour, rooted in the texture of a northern English town, remains surprisingly legible decades on.

Playing a text adventure takes patience and some experimenting with phrasing, since the parser understands only what its authors taught it. The reward is a kind of experience modern games have nearly abandoned: a world that exists purely in words and in the player's imagination.

You do not have to take this description on trust — OldGame.cz boots Urban Upstart right in the browser, so the escape from Scunthorpe can be your own.