Inspired by a love of retro gaming and a fair amount of booze, late one night a clever coder created Pac-Txt, an Infocom-style text adventure version of arcade classic Pac-Man.

Here’s how he explains the genesis of the project:

Well, I had just got back from a party where the concept of a Pac-Man + Zork hybrid came up as a joke. So, being 2am with a little alcohol in my system, I thought it’d be funny to code it up (as far as I could before collapsing).

So, a couple hours later it was looking complete-ish (minus the ghosts’ AIs and graphic assets).

The next morning [read: aftenoon] when I woke up, since I have an inability to realize sunk costs, I decided to throw some crappy AI in for the ghosts, put a few graphics on it (courtesy of FastIcon.com) and voila! A domain name purchase or two later, and here we go.

You just don’t find passion like that every day.

Though it’s good for a chuckle, the game actually isn’t all that fun, since your choices are pretty much limited to “forward,” “backward,” and “eat dot.”

Now, a text adventure version of Frogger, that would be exciting.

Source: Pac-Man, meet Zork via Cnet