Back in the early 80’s, I played a game called The PITS on the dial-up service called The Source, which was later purchased by Compuserve.
The game was much along the lines of Zork or Adventure, both cave crawling games, and was in the same repository as other famous titles like BlackDragon. .
I remember that you found a billion dollar bill, and in order to cross a huge chasm, you had to buy a bridge. The bridge that existed looked like a snaped in two version rope and plank bridge, consumed by the passage of time and wear. But when you made the purchase, a fleet of helicopters, powered by tiny gnomes filled the sky, and they rebuilt the bridge enforce in mere seconds.
Crossing the bridge led you to a huge house, which had all kinds of secret exits into the mountian on which it stood. The game was vast, the descriptions long and beautiful, the parser seemed more capable than Zork, using VERB NOUN DIRECT-OBJECT INDIRECT-OBJECT.
Unfortuately, Compuserve’s strategy was simply to absorb The Source’s customers, not continue service with the PRIMES. From that point forward, the game was lost. Searches on Google, in archives, and usenet have come up with precious little.
However, yesterday the trail became warmer than ever, when I got back in contact with a personal friend who, as it turned out happened to be the CEO of Compuserve for a time. He had some names, and those people had names, and now I’m back in the middle of my search for the software after a few years of nearly giving up.
My goal is to locate anyone who knows anything about the game or can help me contact the author, and if possible, get a copy of the source code, port it to today’s operating systems, and donate it to the open source community.
If anyone knows anything about it, or might know someone who does, please contact me. I’m also looking for any game play listings, so that I can home in on more exact wording the game used, in the case other are also searching for it.
The most extensive news group article I can find about it is this one, only the respondants seem to get derailed and start talking about the history of the company, rather than trying to locate the game. Others were looking for it too, but haven’t gotten as far as I have recently. My past request to usenet in 2001 met with no reply.
UPDATE:
I’m offering a cash reward, should someone step up and go here’s the source code or get me in contact with the actual author.