Back to Geoff's Games Page

Thank you for for your interest in Deliver the Cake! To download it, click here.

magazine cover of July/August 1981 Recreational Computing Deliver the Cake was originally published in the July/August 1981 issue of Recreational Computing magazine. It was the second in a series of three "computerized fantasy simulation" programs written by Dr. Furman H. Smith. The first was Nellan is Thirsty, published in the July/August 1980 issue of Recreational Computing. The third was Deposit the Chair, but unfortunately the magazine was discontinued before Chair's intended publication date. Like its predecessor Nellan is Thirsty, Cake was written for the TRS-80 computer. Unlike Nellan, however, Cake never enjoyed widespread distribution.

So I went back to the beginning. Armed with photocopied listings of source code (obtained from a copy of Recreational Computing on file at Brigham Young University's campus library), I set about to create a fresh version of this game -- and by so doing, make it available to modern audiences. Please note that this project is far less ambitious than my 2002 remake of Nellan. This is simply a direct port of the original TRS-80 text adventure to MS-DOS.

Many thanks to my wife Maria, who did the lion's share of transcribing the BASIC source code from the magazine into our computer. Without her tireless efforts, this project would have taken much longer to complete.

UPDATE: A few weeks after creating my new version of Cake, I learned that R. Alan Monroe had previously written a very nice port of the game using the Python programming language. His version has the added benefit of running on platforms other than Windows, although you may need to download a Python interpreter to play it. (Disclaimer: This version of the game does lack a few niceties such an intro screen and some error checking, but is otherwise entirely playable.)

Happy adventuring!

(For those interested, below is a picture that accompanied the article in the magazine. The thought-bubble from the student shows an artist's depiction of one of the scenes in Deliver the Cake.)
picture of a teacher and students playing a text adventure in the classroom