Below you will find a playable version of ARCTIC ADVENTURE that works right in your browser, as long as you have a physical keyboard. Type RUN and press return to get started. (If you have any issues, make sure to wait a couple of seconds for it to fully load before typing.)
Scroll down to learn more about this sparkling new version of an ancient game-running, for the first time ever, as far as I know, on Radio Shack's TRS-80 MC-10 platform. In color, even. Or at least with a green background.
If you want to know the whole ARCTIC ADVENTURE saga, head here. The shortish version is that I wrote the original version in Level II BASIC for the Radio Shack TRS-80 when I was a high school student in love with the text adventures written by the great Scott Adams. (No, not that one.) I modeled it closely on Adams' games and--unburdened by petty matters such as realism and scientific accuracy--didn't bother to do any research about the setting. I knew it was cold and polar bears lived there, and that was about it.
My game was published in a 1981 book of type-in adventures called CAPTAIN 80'S BOOK OF BASIC ADVENTURES. I got paid. But I didn't bother to save my creation, and the editor never got around to giving me a copy of the tome. To make matters worse, one of his associates told me that the printed version had a bug that rendered it unwinnable. Within a couple of years, I had given up on trying to write games for public consumption, in part because my writing career was going much better (and still is).
Forty years later, I sought redemption. After acquiring a copy of the CAPTAIN 80 book, I finally got around to typing in the game--and discovered that 1981 glitch was so catastrophic that ARCTIC ADVENTURE wasn't just unwinnable, but unplayable. As long as I was repairing it, I also made some meatier improvements to the gameplay, and figured out how to make my remastered edition run in a web browser--no TRS-80 required.
To my shock, my long-delayed update got a ton of attention from the gaming press and various nerdy online destinations. Soon I heard from numerous folks who were playing it, some of whom reported additional bugs or made suggestions for further refinements. ARCTIC ADVENTURE had gone from being broken and forgotten to celebrated--at least for Andy Warhol's requisite 20 minutes.
Since releasing the game on the web, I've heard from several people expressing interest in translating it for other computing platforms. But the first new edition I've seen is Jim Gerrie's port for the TRS-80 Model MC-10, a dirt-cheap, late-era TRS-80 I wasn't too familiar with. (By the time of its release, I had mostly moved on to an Atari 400 computer.)
The MC-10 was introduced in 1983 and lasted only a year on the market. At $120, it was designed to compete with the most bargain-basement of the era's microcomputers. About the size of a hardcover novel, it had a questionable keyboard, only 4KB of RAM, and a limited feature set. Unlike all the TRS-80s I used, however, it offered color graphics, courtesy of a TV you provided yourself.
80 MICRO's reviewer said that beginners would quickly outgrow the MC-10. Looking on the bright side, he also noted that people who bought one and concluded they weren't interested in computers after all wouldn't be out much money. By 1983, the market for super-spartan home computers of this type was dwindling. In 1984, the Shack knocked the MC-10's price down to $80. And then it was gone.
In a fascinating side note, Tandy did strike a deal to release a version of the MC-10 in France, where it was known as the Matra Alice. It was the same machine, but in a striking red case and with a manual illustrated by French cartooning legend Moebius. That gave it a veneer of coolness that no Radio Shack product ever offered.
Like many vintage microcomputers, the MC-10 has had a lively afterlife as fodder for 21st century tech historians and tinkerers. Jim Gerrie has written numerous original MC-10 games as well as adapting vintage ones such as ARCTIC ADVENTURE. Mike Tinnes created the JavaScript MC-10 emulator I used to install Jim's version of the game on this page. I also found James Tamers's MC-10 emulator for Windows helpful. And there's a reasonably active MC-10 group on Facebook.
Meanwhile, the Alice retains a following of its own--last week, I saw one on display amongst all the Apple IIs, Commodore 64s, Ataris, Amigas, and other bigger-name micros at the Vintage Computer Festival here in the Bay Area.
Jim did a great job of getting ARCTIC ADVENTURE up and running on the MC-10. I see some of my original coding techniques under the hood, but it's a substantial rewrite. It runs quickly--an accomplishment for anything written using a 42-year-old BASIC interpreter--and not only doesn't have my original showstopping bug but seems robust in general.
As far as the gameplay goes, I notice only a couple of changes from the original. Like me, Jim removed the dated references to Eskimos. My reference to a sled trip of many miles has become one of many kilometres. Other than that, this is a debugged version of the game as it appeared in the CAPTAIN 80 book. That makes it far closer to what I originally wrote than my own current version, which includes many changes I made in 2021. I am glad to have Jim's port as documentation of the game as high-school me originally envisioned it.
The only tweak I made to Jim's version is to modify the SAVE and LOAD features. In the version on this page, they don't involve a real or virtual cassette and work only during the current browser session. It makes sense to SAVE at least occasionally, since there are several ways to abruptly die.
Here, by the way, is Jim's walkthrough of the whole game from start to victory. It's full of spoilers, so watch it only if you don't want the richly rewarding experience of solving ARCTIC ADVENTURE on your own.
If anyone else manages to get ARCTIC ADVENTURE operating on a computer that can be emulated in a browser, I'll add more versions to this website. I'm not saying it's going to happen. But I'm pretty confident it could. After so many years of even me having nearly forgotten I wrote the thing, that warms my heart.
--Harry McCracken, August 2025