Adventure Construction Set

Magic and unlimited gameplay — that's what Adventure Construction Set promised back in 1987, when the first game editors were starting to appear on screens. I had no idea back then that I'd be digging into this piece thirty years later.

It's a text adventure constructor designed for PC and MS-DOS, which put the tools in your hands to build your own games without a single line of code. It wasn't offering you one specific game to play, but the chance to create dozens. Rooms, objects, NPC characters, conditions, dialogues — everything could be set up in a fairly intuitive menu system. The goal was to teach people what a game actually is, and give them the chance to understand it the best way possible — by inventing one themselves.

The controls aren't complicated, but they demand patience. You input commands based on a vocabulary you set up in the editor, and the game works according to the logic you've instilled in it. There are object dependencies, hidden rooms, or keys to the next level. Playing your own creations is a game in the sense that you never know if you've connected everything correctly until you test it. Mistakes are funny, but frustrating.

Historically, it's a curiosity that was ahead of its time. Twenty years later, something like this would be seen as standard — an editor in every major game, creator instead of consumer. In the eighties, it was something else entirely. Nobody talked about "creativity" and "user-generated content" — those were words that hadn't been used yet. There were just thorough manuals and plenty of time needed for someone to create something that would at least have some logic to it.

Today you can check it out in your browser, and those few minutes with this piece are enlightening. You see that the author believed players were smart. You won't play it for hours, but you'll feel what that future was like, when the idea was being born that games are something you create yourself.