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Playing this is like rediscovering Buddy Holly all over again. Classic Adventure is a cover version of the very first adventure of all. Simply titled Adventure, it was designed and ran on a mainframe, and gee, it sure was big - in fact, it's still one of the biggest adventure games on the market.

None of your namby-pampy messing around with graphics here, just pure text, and lots of it. Virtually every Adventure conversion we still use sprang fully fleged from this prototype. Inventory, two-word commands, the inevitable torch that you have to keep lit somehow, the lot...

Quite frankly, it all goes to show how little the genre has progressed since then. I enjoyed (re)playing this more than many newer offerings - it has a freshness and wit that comes from having been written for fun, not profit. For jaded hacks like me, new twists have been put in many of the problems. Without giving too much away, the old method for chasing away the snake will no longer serve you here.

I think that everyone should have a copy of this for reference, but then I think the same about Joy Division's first album.