Lost Dutchman Gold

Geoff Coyle | Tags: WVU football, Mountaineers, Bill Stewart, Dana Holgorsen ...

It’s a story Stewart told us every day out in the desert, one that made the team laugh and in some roundabout way soak in a message that our gold was waiting in the form of a $1.3 million trophy inside a Glendale stadium. By the end of the week, all he needed to say were those three sentences above and each one of the players kneeling before him knew the meaning behind it. Time to create their own place in a history book. When history looks back on Stewart, though, what tale will they tell? Will it be one of the loyal West Virginian who stuck with his team through a difficult ordeal and led his troops to one of the program’s biggest wins? Or will the allegations, which Athletic Director Oliver Luck says could not be substantiated, tarnish the image he had built through years of service for the University? Stewart’s integrity has been called into question multiple times since those days, but never to the extent of the past few weeks. After first failing to notify his assistants that they would no longer have jobs with the program, and now facing allegations that he attempted a smear campaign against his successor, it will be tough for the man to regain the perception he once held. Another photo from the album, this time just Stewart and me in the Fiesta Bowl locker room after all the commotion had settled down. I had since changed from my game clothes to put on my champions hat and shirt. Stewart wore a matching shirt, but it was on top of his game polo and tucked into his game pants. His sideline pass still dangled from his belt. I always felt the head coaching position changed my once-favorite assistant coach. It was evident in practice throughout my senior year and in my two years on the media side of this equation it’s been downright shocking at times. Admittedly, my decision to begin reporting on the team after four years of working for it could be a big reason for the personal changes I noticed, but everybody needs a job, right?

Gaming After 40: Adventure of the Week: The Lost Dutchman's Gold ...

In memory of Bob "Captain 80" Liddil, who recently passed away, we're going to look at one of the earliest TRS-80 text adventures we've tackled -- The Lost Dutchman's Gold, written in 1979 by "Teri Li" (a.k.a. Terry Kepner) and published as the very first release from the late Mr. Liddil's company, The Programmer's Guild.  Its opening screen uses the Radio Shack TRS-80 computer's double-width text mode, which was quite the impressive hardware feature back in its day. A technical aside -- if you're tracking this game down in the online Internet archives, be aware that the version called LSTDUT1A/BAS doesn't seem to work, and LSTDUT1B/BAS is much more reliable.  There's a functional SAVE GAME command in this one, so you will probably want to play it on (real or virtual) diskette for the sake of speed.  And if you're playing on an emulator, you might want to crank up the CPU speed a little bit, as this one's written in BASIC and doesn't always respond with haste. The Lost Dutchman's Gold was a pretty early microcomputer adventure game, following closely in Scott Adams' pioneering footsteps, but with an interesting stylistic difference -- the story is formally hosted by THE GHOST OF BACKPACK SAM .  Usually there's no personified narrator in these games, and this character lends a little freshness to the experience; I like to picture this one as an ethereal Gabby Hayes. As the game begins, we find ourselves in a vintage gold rush setting, standing in a miner's shack with limited supplies.  It seems that we can't really do much, either, which led me at first to speculate that perhaps we are also a ghost, or that the parser is very, very limited.  But eventually I figured out that the engine is simply case-sensitive, dating from the early TRS-80 days when no lowercase character set was available, and only responds to uppercase input.  We need to use INV (with optional additional letters) to check our inventory, not I .  And my initial SCORE attempt yielded YOU CAN'T, YOU'RE IN THE WRONG LOCATION!    So there's one puzzle -- we have to find the right place, which turns out to be the saloon in town.  The game calculates our score as both a count and percentage of the available treasures; there are only four in this relatively brief adventure. There are a few things we can do before leaving the shack.

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