Mystery Mansion

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Mystery Mansion is the name of a text-based adventure game originally written in the late 1970s for HP mini-computers. It ran on the HP-1000 and the HP-3000. The original version was written by Bill Wolpert in unstructured Fortran. Some programmers have kept it alive for the PC by converting the Fortran-IV source code to C. Two ports are known to exist, one by James Garnett of the University of Colorado and one by Bob Sorem of the University of Minnesota (see illustration).

The object of the single-player game is to find one's way through a run-down, foreboding mansion in order to find various treasures, solve a murder, sleep with the maid (if very lucky), and avoid getting "killed" in the process all before the mansion is destroyed by fire at midnight to end the game. In addition to the 3 rooms x 3 rooms x 3 stories cube-shaped mansion, there are gardens, tunnels, nefarious characters, and other obstacles to make one's way through or around. Being text-based, there are no illustrations at all, so the player has to imagine everything that is being described.

[edit] External links

• The Mainframe Adventures site has more information about Mystery Mansion as well as other mainframe-based games.
• Bob Sorem's port of Mystery Mansion written in C for DOS/Windows.
• Archive file of James Garnett's port into C - this includes the original Fortran source as well!