From Subtext Wranglers comes the startlingly fresh text adventure,
Road Trip: Southwest USA. Originally released in 1996,
Road Trip was Subtext's last ditch effort to save their long-ailing company in the middle of a text adventure market slump. More of a market funeral, really. The market was dead. Dead, dead, dead. Parrot dead.
The ensuing copyright controversy over thematic elements that were strikingly similar to a yet-to-be-released Sega CD game resulted in Subtext's demise. The publisher pulled the product, and it plunged headlong into obscurity.
Until now.
We recovered the last known copy of
Road Trip from a 5.25" floppy found in a surplus disk caddy purchased at a local estate sale. We don't know how the disk came to be there, and it appears that the original box, instructions, and 3.5" diskette have been lost to time. And now, we make the game available to you, free of charge (actual cash value).
Desert demake.
Developed in linux from scratch in 4 or 5 days. Written in Ruby using the Rubygame library with SDL bindings. It looks like a text console, but it's actually an animated graphic recreation. That's why the scroll looks sluggish on your kitten-flogging quad core; it's intentional.
Linux download! (zip)Windows download! (zip)Source tarball!Windows compatibility: Tested to work with Windows XP Home, tested NOT to work in Windows 98. I'm going to pretend that it's compatible with Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista until someone proves me wrong.
OSX users: I don't see why the source shouldn't run if you can get your hands on an OSX version of the Rubygame library and its dependencies. I don't have an OSX box for testing, don't see one in my future, and don't have any OSX developer friends.