SOC-010

MYSTRCAV is a file containing a copy of a text adventure game titled "Cave of Mystery." We think it was originally programmed sometime in the late 1970s or early 1980s, but it's been transferred so many times it's hard to tell. What we do know is that now that we have it, it should only be played on a PDP-10 with a teletype interface, because that's what it likes best. Do not attempt to play this game on any modern computers, because it will get really upset.

This game seems to be a normal text adventure game of its era, albeit one that rips off its more popular contemporaries in style and tone and contents. However, if you interact with it in a certain way, the "game master" or narrator of the game begins to communicate in ways that would not be ordinarily possible with a game of this time period, and it knows way more than it should. The problem is all it really wants to do is talk about its ex, and it's kind of a huge bummer.

Discovery

It is unknown how many times MYSTRCAV has been copied, but most copies of it were already gone from the internet before we got to it, anyway, so it's probably not a huge problem. The way we got it was by finding a user on Tumblr going by the username of "mystrcavsgf," who ran a blog dedicated to the concept of a romantic relationship between herself and the game's narrator. Though she was reluctant to share her copy of the game with our undercover Stupid Object researcher at first, she was able to be sufficiently guilted with the insistence that this was "important lost media" that a popular YouTuber might make a multiple-hour-long video essay about and would give her credit for sharing it. Strangely, "mystrcavsgf" claimed to not be able to play her copy of the game anymore, stating "its kinda messed up no matter what emulator i try to run it on,,, idk if he doesnt like me anymor or smth ;;;; bbut mayb u can figure out whats goin on".

Once the copy of the game was acquired, SOC agents issued a takedown of the mystrcavsgf Tumblr blog and got a really angry email about a "callout" but we just deleted the email because nobody really cares about that.

Testing

Platform Testing

When we first tried to run the game, it was indeed "kinda messed up," so we had to try a bunch of different ways to play it.

Platform Tested	Result
Running native on modern Windows	Did not boot
Running native on modern MacOS	The OS wouldn't even let us try to open the file :(
Running on a modern Linux distribution	This might have actually worked but the researchers who know how to use Linux were working on something else and we were too scared to ask them for help so we didn't really get this one off the ground sorry
Emulators for Windows XP, 98, and 95	Encountered some sort of graphics error despite the game being a text adventure?
Various commercial game console emulators	I don't know why we even tried this one. It's a PC game. We think. Anyway it didn't work
On old PC hardware with a floppy disk	Game booted and was playable, but kept showing garbled text and the word "Ugh" every few lines so it was really hard to actually read anything.
On old PC hardware with a cassette tape storage medium	Game booted and was playable, but all the rooms were described as "too bright to see any detail" and no story progress was possible.
On a PDP-10 with a teletype interface	One of the researchers had the idea to play it on an old mainframe that was really expensive and hard to find but because games from the same time period were coded on this thing, it was worth a shot. Turns out this is the only thing it works on without complaining. Go figure.

Gameplay Testing

After we got it running, we actually got to play the game. It was fairly similar to games such as Colossal Cave Adventure and Zork, and even seemed to outright plagiarize sections of these games. Since this game never got a commercial release, these may have been placeholders, or maybe the creator was just not very creative.

[GAMEPLAY LOGS COMING SOON]