THIRSTY NELLAN traces its roots to a public domain text-adventure game called "Nellan is Thirsty," by Dr. Furman H. Smith. It first appeared in 1980 in "Recreational Computing" magazine as sample code for aspiring programmers. Although originally written for the TRS-80 computer, the game was ported shortly thereafter to the Commodore 64, where it was widely distributed.

I discovered the game in the late 1980's, and I thought it was pretty neat. In recent years, whenever I'd think nostalgically on my childhood, I'd feel a stab of sadness that future generations would likely never see this game --- first, because the C-64 is a dead platform, and secondly because modern gamers rarely have the patience for text adventures anyway.

So gradually the idea came to me to completely re-write the game as a graphical adventure for modern computers, with color and sound and a point-n-click interface. And that's what I did. I wrote the bulk of the program in my spare time as a graduate student at Brigham Young University, although I've made several enhancements since then (current version is 1.04). The basic storyline is largely the same as the original 8-bit text adventure, but everything else is new. (For contrast, the download includes a copy of the original C-64 version of the game in the "Bonus Material" folder. You'll need to download a Commodore emulator to play it.)

The game comes with the full source code, so you can modify it to your heart's content. Both Windows and Linux versions are included in the download.

That's it! I hope you enjoy playing it as much as I've enjoyed creating it. I'd love to hear what you think. Please address all correspondance to thirstynellan "at" yahoo.com. (If you enjoy Thirsty Nellan, you may also wish to try out some of my other games.)

Click here for some screenshots from the game! Or click here for some other links of interest.