Haunted And Hunted By The Wumpus; Or, My Emulated Christmas Memory

The first computer I ever used hooked up to what was then — around 1986 or so — a 20-year-old TV that we kept in my brother’s room. It was a TI99 my mother bought on clearance at Zayre in Worcester. And it was awesome.

It came with a bunch of games that I really loved and over Christmas, in a fit of auld lang syne, I decided that I just had to play them again. Of course, by now, the ancient hardware was lost to antiquity (read: “parents’ attic”).

Hope was lost. Until, that is, I discovered what is quite possibly my new favorite software.

It’s an emulator that mimics the TI99 and comes with a couple of games, most of which were the ones I wanted.

Parsec was the one that got me going on the TI99 kick to begin with. It’s a side-scrolling spaceship game where you shoot alien ships. I remember it being a lot more fun than it actually was.

But there were two others that I really wanted. One was The Attack, which is basically a game where you pilot a miniature spaceship around and shoot this genetic-looking material before it turns into 4-legged creatures; a creepy idea, in hindsight. And of course that one wasn’t included with the emulator, so I had to find a version of it that someone else had hacked. (Note: The game is included with this one.)

The other was a game that I remember being a lot less fun than it actually is: Hunt The Wumpus. The goal of the game is to deduce where inside of a maze of rooms the wumpus hides. When you begin, you don’t know the shape of the maze. You have only a single arrow with which to kill the wumpus. If you miss, he eats you. If you land in his room, he eats you.

Oh yeah: There are pits inside of these mazes that, if you walk on them, will result in your plummeting to your death.

Of course, there are clues to the wumpus’s location. It leaves a trail of blood (read: “a single red circle”) in two rooms preceding him from any direction. Pits have slime on the walls (read: “green circles”) in any room adjacent to them. Heed the warnings, or perish.

It’s pretty much a dangerous life, that of the wumpus hunter.

And I can’t get enough of it. I have been playing this game for about a week now. It never gets old. At least, not in the first week.

Try it.