John Laird's Computer Games Research: Haunt
Haunt
Haunt was a text-based interactive adventure. It was inspired by
Advent, although Haunt was a bit over-the-top, and quirky (and a bit
buggy). Haunt was developed by me while I was a graduate student at
Carnegie Mellon around 1980-1981. At that time, I was involved in
research on rule-based systems (working with Allen Newell), and decided
that I wanted to use rule-based systems to create a game (inspired by
Adventure). Haunt was written in OPS-4, which in turn was written in
Interlisp and it was never ported to any other machines, so I'm afraid
that Haunt is really dead. I started to port Haunt to OPS-5, but
quickly gave up. Haunt was the first rule-based system to have over
1000 rules and it topped out at around 1500. Because of its size, it
served as an important data point in early research on building large
rule-based systems. The source code is probably on tape somewhere at
CMU, but I'm not sure.
The plot behind Haunt was that you had to explore a haunted house, find
treasure and escape the house with your life. It violated most, if not all,
of the design guidelines for good interactive fiction in that you could get
killed much too easily, the puzzles were way too obscure (many based on
Saturday morning cartoons from my youth), but it had a certain charm.