Years ago, there was a competiton: “Interpret Kaizers Orchestra in any way.”

I did. I sat down and wrote a text adventure – really old-fashioned, based on text only, no graphics, no video sequences, only commands, story, and running gags. And even though the verdict of the competition was that it “doesn’t really relate to the Kaizers universe” (after the person judging it entered two commands and thus didn’t have a chance to find anything relating to the Kaizers universe …) – this game was probably the greatest and most fun programming project I’d ever done.

Use big stick on barrel – The Kaizers Orchestra Text Adventure

Some years later, the DÄFC – or at that time DÄOF (den die ärzte ihr offizieller Fanclub, the official fan club of the German band die ärzte) celebrated its fifth birthday. Of course, we had to do something special in honor of this anniversary – but what? It didn’t take long to come up with an idea: a die ärzte text adventure! Again I spent weeks sitting at my computer, struggling and fighting with commands, objects, and rooms, having a huge amount of fun giggling about my own gags. I just loved building in as many mean tricks, hints, and easter eggs as possible. When it was finished, the text adventure managed to keep the fan club members busy for the next days and weeks and – in a positive way, of course =;-) – drive them a little bit crazy.

The DÄFC doesn’t exist anymore, but I wanted to save the game. I had to adapt it a bit to get it running outside of the closed member area and on another server. So if there are any problems, let me know under adventure01@konzertjunkie.com!

Nimm Schwert, geh Polen, sprich mit René – Das DÄOF-Text-Adventure

Enjoy the games!

And for the techies: The adventures are written from scratch in PHP. In the Kaizers adventure, status is handled entirely via session cookies. The DÄOF adventure uses a database in addition to session cookies. And no, there’s no framework you could download and use – I did actually manage to clean up the code quite a bit when I wrote the second adventure, but it’ll need at least a third one until this code would be usable for anyone else. =;-)