You’re in for a treat, fans of comedy and high adventure! This week we’re joined by Ali Fisher and Carly Monardo from Rude Tales of Magic and Oh These, Those Stars of Space. You’re in for a savage disappointment, fans of logic and coherence! We’re playing Marvel Questprobe’s The Hulk.
In 1984, Marvel Comics launched an ambitious series of 12 text-adventure games complete with tie-in comic book lines starring their flagship characters. It was a huge release not to be taken lightly, so they teamed up with a company called Adventure Interactive run by Scott Adams, total lunatic.
For the very first installment in this massive crossover event, he chose to build a text-based puzzle adventure game starring… The Hulk. You know, the character who solves all puzzles with smashing, and can barely speak? Scott Adams then designed a tiny looping meta-prison and set him off on a psychedelic non-adventure about gem collecting and digging holes. It never went anywhere near sense, and it gassed you every time you tried to use your Hulk powers.
That was the best way Scott Adams’ broken brain knew to communicate his plight to the outside world. This was not a game, it was a plea for help filtered through the corrupted logic centers of a man who’d almost certainly been poisoned by the dangerous metals inside early home computers. Here are all the images you’ll need to decipher the visual code he uses to beg for death.
Don’t forget to dig us a hole (that’s mercury poisoning for subscribe) and then ants attack eyes (cadmium poisoning for review).