PC Games - San Francisco Earthquake

The year was 1985. PC games were almost non existent. The personal computer itself was in its infant stages. The amount of memory you had in a PC was about 64K. PC games? Certainly there weren't any PC games back then even worth playing, not with that kind of memory. Well, actually there was. If you had yourself a Radio Shack TRS 80, there was a game so popular that people who owned these computers couldn't stop playing it. The game was called "San Francisco Earthquake - 1906".

The game was to take place around the time of the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906. But the game itself was not really about the earthquake. Oh yes, it happens during the game, which only makes things that more difficult, but the main objective is to find your wife who has been kidnapped.

Played entirely in text mode, no graphics, you awake to find a note by your bedside that your wife has been kidnapped. You then receive a phone call with a ransom demand. Suddenly there is a terrible shaking and it hits. You're now in the middle of the worst earthquake in San Francisco history and your wife has been kidnapped. What a way to start the day.

The game is played by issuing commands to the computer such as look, get, north, south, east, west (to move around) open, close, inventory and a number of other commands. There is a very limited help function that basically gives you the list of commands that you can use. The only graphics in the game, if you can call them graphics, occur whenever the aftershocks hit. The screen shakes a bit.

The game, in spite of it being pretty bare bones, was very hard. The number of puzzles you had to solve and items you had to get were numerous to say the least. Many times you would have to backtrack to a place you had been to before to pick up an item that only appears after you got another item or another aftershock hits.

For example. There is one part of the game where you reach a pile of rubble. You search through it but don't find anything. So you move on. Later on during the game, another aftershock hits. If you think enough to go back to the pile of rubble, you will see that it had been disturbed and if you look closely enough you will now find an item that you didn't see before.

You had to really think outside the box to play this game. There was no instruction manual and no clue book. For those of you who are programmers, you can figure out where everything is. The game was written in a combination of BASIC and Assembler Language. By printing out the source and object files, if you can read this stuff, you can figure out exactly the order for every item you need to find and where they are found.

The game was a real challenge. And while it didn't have all the bells and whistles of the modern day PC games, it was far from boring.