A Poetic Text… Adventure?

Although I try not to post links, this little piece of BASIC poetry written by Matthew Sewell caught my eye. On the SWCollect mailing list, Matt wrote of his jeering poesy:

It struck me that the first line of the Frost poem was like the start of a Colossal Cave type of game (“You are standing at the end of a road…”). So I took it from there, adding a snarky Infocom voice to a poem that I consider over-serious. The code is primitive to be sure (though it does work), but both the editor and I were concerned about accessibility. Actually he’s the one who encouraged me to expand the frame of reference to several other games — he figured that if we’re doing this, we might as well commit to it. Anyway, you all are just about the only people I know who will consider it too obvious rather than too obscure…

Hardcore retro-gaming, text adventure, and BASIC-coding enthusiasts might be able to parse the program just using their imagination, but I needed some help. I copied and pasted the program (from Lines 10 to 490) into Joshua Bell’s Applesoft BASIC Interpreter, clicked Run, and enjoyed 45 seconds of pretentious smirking. Does anyone else find this ingeniously funny?

Maybe I’m getting old.