Adventure! ... in BASIC???

Over the weekend, I was feeling sorry for myself for not having as much time to program as I would like, so I sneaked a few hours (about 6) to write an adventure game.  I thought a bit about what language to use.  Part of me wanted to do it in one of the functional languages, but I knew I wouldn't have enough time to both learn the language sufficiently AND write enough to be recognizably adventurous.

And then a wave of nostalgia swept over me.

BASIC.

And none of this new-fangled BASIC with block-structured coding constructs.  Basic BASIC.  With 1 or 2 character variable names, and lots of GOTOs.

I gotta say, I haven't had this much fun programming in years.  I actually chuckled at times, remembering the old days of:

3165 if w <= 9 then 3170
3167   print "Too many words!  Talk more simply."
3168   v$ = "" :  n$ = "" : return
3170 rem

OK, the pedantic among you will say that putting multiple statements on a line is not basic BASIC.  Oh well, I make the rules, I can break them.  But I did restrict myself to variable names of one letter, or one letter and one digit, with all variables gloriously global.  Man, kids today don't know how good they have it.

>load "a.txt"
>run
You are in a brightly-lit room.  Birds are singing, puppies and kitties are playing in the sunlight streaming in through cheerily open windows.  There is a hole in the north wall that looks just big enough to crawl through.
You see:
  a grey bag of scratchy cloth
? north
You are in a dimly-lit room.  Shadowey figures seem to slither towards you.  A low moan can faintly be heard.  What little light penetrates the ominous darkness comes from the south.
You see:
  a fabulous 100-carat diamond!
? take diamond
got it.
You are in dim room
? n
Can't go that way
You are in dim room
? s
You are in a brightly-lit room.  Birds are singing, puppies and kitties are playing in the sunlight streaming in through cheerily open windows.  There is a hole in the north wall that looks just big enough to crawl through.
You see:
  a grey bag of scratchy cloth
? look at the grey bag
a grey bag of scratchy cloth
which contains:
  an iron key, slightly rusted
You are in bright room
? take bag
 NEXT without FOR  in line 9075
>

Whoopsie!  Looks like I need a bit more debugging.  :-)

Or not.  The exercise accomplished its purpose, which honestly was more to feel young again than hone my coding skills.  I.e. I don't think I'll be putting this on my resume any time soon.  ;-)

Update: I thought I might put it up on github, not because it is a useful or notable piece of work, but because I wanted to be the first person to put BASIC on github.  No such luck.  There is a ton of BASIC already on github.  Oh well...