Today I finally accomplished something I started more than 20 years ago.

I’ve been reading a lot about old computers lately, and since I was home today (still waiting for my mouth to get unswollen), I decided to look for an emulator for the home computer I had when I was a kid, the TI-99/4A. My parents gave me one for my ninth birthday, in December 1982. Compared to the other popular computers at the time, such as the TRS-80 and the VIC-20, the TI-99/4A was kind of crappy, and its version of BASIC was annoyingly quirky. But I found a TI-99/4A emulator this morning and downloaded it.

The cool thing about the emulator is that it comes preloaded with tons of games that you originally had to buy as separate cartridges. (I have fond memories of going to Toys ‘R’ Us with my dad and coming home with a couple of new games.)

So, the thing I finally accomplished today? One of my favorite games was Adventure, by Scott Adams (generally known as “Pirate Adventure”). Today it would be considered primitive — it was entirely text, no graphics, and you could enter only two-word commands, verb-object. And I loved it. (I remember having to save my place on a cassette tape; whenever I wanted to start from that place again, I had to play the tape and wait several minutes for the tape counter to get to 054. The tape machine would make this annoying electronic crunching noise the whole time, until it got to the right spot on the tape.)

But while I got really far in the game, I was never able to solve it.

So today I played Adventure again — and I still couldn’t solve it.

I’m 30 years old now and I still couldn’t figure it out. Even more embarrassing, I discovered today that the game is designated as “Beginner.” I had to look for some hints and the solution online — and I was disappointed to realize that I’d always been much closer to the end of the game than I’d always thought, and that consequently the universe of the game was much smaller than I’d always thought. I’d always thought that perhaps there were whole new settings in Pirate Adventure for me to explore, but no.

I feel like some fond illusions from my childhood have disappeared.

Anyway, now I’m nostalgic for all those old Infocom games, like Zork and whatnot. I’ll have to find those online, too.

(Oh, and here’s the list of commands to complete Pirate Adventure from start to finish. I counted 261.)