Reward for The PITS

SYNOPSIS: I'm looking for an old adventure game I played online back in the 1980's. Help me find it, and there could be cash in it for you.

CASH REWARD: $250 US

to the first person who can legally obtain and deliver
the source code to The PITS
as it appeared on The Source

CASH REWARD: $25 US

to first the person who can
identify the non-disputed author, and
get me in touch with him

CASH REWARD: $5 US

to the first five people that can
provide substancial, recognizable,
conclusive game play captures / listings

Please contact Walt Stoneburner.

Around the early 1980's, I played an online single player, role-playing, interactive fiction, text adventure game called The PITS via the online service called "The Source" (Source Telecomputing Corporation). I believe the command to invoke it was PLAY PITS. Or, possibly GO PITS.

I am offering a cash reward to the person who can get the source code to the game, so that it can be ported to Unix via GCC and released to the open source community.

I am looking for:

  • Links to other sites with PITS infomation.
  • People who have played the game and can reconstruct details about it.
  • Employees of The Source who might know what happened to the systems and source.
  • Print outs and screen shots of actual game play.
  • The name of the game's author(s).
  • Contact information for the author(s).
  • Source code to the game.
  • Permission to port and release it freely, with the original author retaining credit.

I fear that the source code is sitting in some archive, code listing on a self, or on a dusty mag tape waiting to see the light of day again.

The PITS: What is it? The game description.

As I've described the game to people, they wonder if I have it confused with classic adventure or Zork. I do not.

Specific details from the game are sketchy.

  • It had hundreds of rooms and many objects.
  • It had very long and elaborate room descriptions.
  • It used VERB DIRECTOBJECT INDIRECTOBJECT commands and could handle adjectives to disambiguate similar objects.
    This allowed for things like: OPEN THE WOODEN DOOR WITH THE BRASS KEY ON THE TABLE.

The PITS: Bridge For Sale What I recall of the opening sequence was finding a bill of huge demonination, but being trapped on the far side of a chasm with a broken wooden sign that said bridge for sale, although there was no bridge in sight.

Nonetheless, purchasing the bridge resulted in a swarm of minature helicopters descending, and minature creatures constructing, in just mere moments, the most elaborate bridge across the chasm. One of them grabbed your bill, gave you some piddling change, and they all disappeared into the horizon.

Crossing the bridge led to an interesting house that you had to break into, and the various exits within the house took you to the bowels of a very large and elaborate mountain.

If you played outside, there was an open grave, and the text descriptions would entice you to get close. Too close. Because doing so would result in your falling in and breaking your neck, as if the grave had been recently dug for you.

The game offered more rooms and more score granularity than other text adventure games (the only kind at the time).

Other Games on The Source

Other popular games on The Source were Blackdragon (by Bob Maples, described here, and possibly last seen somewhere on DECUS long ago), Adventure, Zork, Hunt the Wumpus, and a number of rather dull strategy board games.

The PITS: Clues Gathered

What information I have to make finding it easier, I detail here. It's not much.

More PITS Lore

It is believed that The PITS ran on Prime computers under the PRIMOS operating system. It is possible that it ran under PrimeBASIC, but that detail is very uncertain.

Tracking PITS on the Internet

One would think that finding The PITS would be easy in this day and age. Not so. Usenet postings about it are rare:

UPDATE: On July 4, 2009, Slashdot posted a message AOL Shuts Down CompuServe. This helps re-ignite the search for The PITS.

UPDATE: On July 5, 2009, Peter De Wachter discovered on Google Books the following references:

eMail Trackbacks

I've approached a number of people who have been quite helpful in either providing some information or referencing me to someone else. [Blue = I've conversed with, Red = Haven't heard from or have no contact info]

Thanks to Charlie Terry, Bruce MacNaughton, Dave Eastburn, Alexander "Sandy" Trevor, and especially Taylor Walsh for helping me get further than ever before in my quest to locate this software.

As of 22-Jan-06, I have not heard back from Gary Brown, Mike Sears, or Brian Biggs.

In some sense, I fear that I've contacted people too high up the corporate ladder to be intimate with this software package.

What I'd really like to find is some hard core users of The Source, and ideally some people who worked on and adminstered the machines.

Charlie Terry, Bruce MacNaughton, Gary Brown, Dave Eastburn, Sandy Trevor, Taylor Walsh, Mike Sears, Brian Biggs

Many of these kind souls are consultants or leaders of corporations, and I do not feel it right to burden them with this matter. I request that unless you know them personally, you do the same.

Update: On August 1st, 2006 I was contacted by Jim Rutt who worked at the source from 1981-1982, and he suggested Jeff Entwisle as someone else who worked as the head of software and systems at The Source.

Unfortuantely, I got Jim's email two months late (long story), and am hoping he can put me in contact with Jeff Entwisle.

Update: On October 31st, 2006 I was contacted by Taylor Walsh. He remembers the little green booklet that mentions The PITS, and after a few email exchanges is fairly certain he remembers it, too, though not in any great detail.

Taylor also suggested Brian Biggs might have some information, and provided a new name, David Lebling, who was one of the original guys that wrote and marketed Zork. The goal is to re-establish the social network, in a seven degrees to Kevin Bacon style, back to the original creator of The PITS.

Also, while doing a search for Brian Biggs on the Internet, I happened to come across this name, Ed Isaacs, in association with Brian Briggs, as a CompuServer administrator who managed SYSADM@csi.compuserve.com while reading RFC1700. Perhaps he may remember, if I can track down his info.

I do not know how to reach Ed Isaacs.

Update: On January 2, 2007, Tom Walker informed me that Dialcom, Inc. wrote the first software for The Source and ran their machines at a building in Silver Spring, MD.

They were a time-sharing company, running first Honeywell 1648s and then Primes. They were founded in 1970 by Bob Ryan and two others. Tim joined two months later and became VP in charge of software development.

In 1979 Bill Von Meister presented a proposition in which he's provide a low-cost (around $2.25 per hour) version of our system to home users. At the time was being used by schools, government, and business firms.

Tom's group developed email, some database searching tools, the "chat" command for users online at the same time, and other tools for Bill.

Eventually Bill bought his own machines, running them over in McLean Virginia and, when Readers Digest purchased the Source, Dialcom was paid for their our efforts.

At the time many local high school kids brought games to the system, and helped with operating system changes, but unfortunately Tom doesn't recall who put Pits up.

It could have been someone at Dialcom, someone at the Source, or just a contribution by a user. Suspecting he might know someone who may have more information, Tom did some digging.

Tom forwarded me an email chain between him and Fritz Thane. Fritz believe that PITS was put up after the systems were moved to McLean.

He believes it was using the same engine as the version of Adventure called ADV550. Apparently there was an engine that could be used to build lots of different games and that probably someone at The Source decided they should have their own flavor of an Adventure game.

Tom informed me that they owned wrote their programs in Fortran IV and once in a great while in BASIC.

Update: On September 5, 2008, Ron Schnell contacted me stating he had a wall-sized map of the game at one time. He worked for Dialcom, which was the company that maintained the computers for The Source.

He's fairly confident with was written in Fortran, and most definately was running on Primos on Pr1me Computers.

The only thing he remember of significance about the map wa that there was a giant "PIT" in the middle.

Update: On July 6, 2009, Peter De Wachter noted the speculation that The PITS might have been written with the same engine as Adventure 550. He suggested that I contact Dave Platt, who wrote that version of adventure in A-code, along with Mike Arnautov who has done a lot of work with a-code (ADV550's engine).

Dave wrote back reporting he was inded the designer of the interpretive language and wrote the first version of the munger (parser) and the interpreter in FORTRAN 8x as a port of the original Crowther/Woods 350 version, then expanded the game to 550 points. He later wrote a new version in PL-6 on a Honeywell CP-6.

The FORTRAN version of Adventure 550 was distributed to members of HLSUA (Honeywell Large System Users Association), with the PL-6 version a couple years later.

ADV550 was made available on The Source and CompuServe as well. So if The PITS was using the same engine, this might provide another lead.

It's suspect that someone from The Source or Dialcom might have developed an enhanced version of the A-code parser and interpreter, though it would have been a significant upgrade or reimplementation. Dave is trying to recall who he did some business with at The Source, and that person may have another clue. (Thanks Dave! -wls)

Update: On July 7, 2009 heard from John LoPresti; he worked the Dialcom messaging business from NYC and didn't have significant dealing with The Source prior to the buyout. He suggested Phil McKnight and Bob Ryan.

Update: On July 7, 2009 heard from Jay Keller, who turned out to be long gone by the time The PITS had disappeared.

Update: On July 7, 2009 I heard from Mike Arnautov; he's quite familiar with Dave's original a-code and believes that mutating it to support a Zork-style command parsing would not have been a simple matter; even the current one which he's working on now only does verb/noun. In my mind, this strongly suggests that The PITS was not done in the ADV550 engine.

Mike has forwarded the search on to Russell Dalenberg, a collector of rumors and lost adventure versions.