A Text Adventure — BASIC & Inform 7
Dracula's Castle is a classic BASIC text adventure from the early 1980s, part of a wave of type-in vampire castle games that flourished on home computers of the era — alongside titles like Vampire Castle (1980) by Mike Bassman, The Count (1979) by Scott Adams, and Castle Dracula (1983) by Paul T. Johnson. These games defined a genre: explore a gothic castle, gather items, solve puzzles, and destroy the vampire before time runs out. The original BASIC source for this version was written for home microcomputers with ANSI terminal support and represents the ingenuity of an era when entire adventure games fit in a few kilobytes of code.
This project includes a faithful translation into Inform 7, the groundbreaking natural-language interactive fiction system created by Graham Nelson. Inform 7 allows authors to write interactive fiction in something close to English prose — a radical departure from traditional programming that opened the art form to writers of all backgrounds. Graham Nelson also created the original Inform compiler (1993) and authored Curses, one of the landmark works of the post-Infocom era.
Emily Short contributed enormously to Inform 7, writing most of the 300+ programming examples in the documentation and creating demo games that showed what the system could do. Her own works — Galatea, Counterfeit Monkey, Bronze, and many others — are landmarks of interactive fiction. Andrew Hunter built the Inform 7 IDE for macOS, and countless contributors have extended the system with extensions, tools, and interpreters.
The castle contains 19 rooms, 25 objects, and over a dozen interlocking puzzles — from extinguishing fires and smashing through brickwork to rowing across underground lakes and staking vampires. A real-time clock ticks from 8:00 PM; if you haven't killed Dracula by midnight, he wakes and finds you.
The Inform 7 translation preserves the original game's map, puzzles, objects, and time system while taking advantage of Inform 7's natural-language syntax and built-in world model. The original BASIC source uses a compact data-driven engine with encoded verb/noun lookup tables; the Inform 7 version expresses the same logic through named rules, actions, and properties.
The original BASIC source is believed to be an uncredited type-in program from the 1980s. No author attribution has been found in the code or in any historical archive. If you are the original author, please get in touch.