Mickey Cendrowski is one of the few female Adventure game
programmers out there. She worked on classic Adventure games for the TI-99/4A such as Oliver’s Twist and Rattlesnake Bend. She created an Adventure game database, as well as other work, such as utilities for genealogy and a “load” program. The recent film by Jason Scott, Get Lamp, was released shortly after this interview. This film chronicles some of the major events in the history of Interactive Fiction and Adventure Games. It has interviews with some of the most famous programmers and authors of the genre, talking in retrospect about their famous creations. If you haven’t seen it, buy it. Unfortunately, no TI99/4A programmers were interviewed. Hence, the inspiration for this text.
Mickey: Too bad the movie is already done, but then again it is
also bad that Jason never even contacted me directly. You would think that even if the movie was done he would have had the interest to follow-up on possibly the only girls who ever wrote the text adventure games using the Tex-Comp Adventure Editor. The only other girl that I know of is Lynn Gardner who co-wrote Oliver’s Twist with me, then she went on to create Zoom Flume by herself.
Our games were superior to the Scott Adams ones for two reasons. Scott would use a noun in his general description, like saying that a squirrel was there, and that word would appear on your screen, but then when you would say “Look squirrel”, the game would say “I don’t know what a squirrel is”. Lynn and I made sure that if we used a word in our game, you could use it as well.
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