Getting interactive fiction onto the Pico-8 has been something of an ongoing discussion amongst the Pico-8 dev community for a while. There have been some interesting projects in this space, including an amazing port of Colossal Cave and (not to brag) my own Status Line interpreter (which allows you to play Zork).

There haven't been too many attempts that I've seen which try to bring full graphic adventures to the Pico-8, so I decided to start at the beginning and dive headfirst into porting Mystery House to the Pico-8. The original Apple 2 (public domain) classic had a lot of limitations that are similar to the Pico-8's limitations, so it seemed like a good exercise in seeing what could be done. The original 140K game has been squeezed down into a 60K cartridge, which includes all text, graphics, **and bugs** from the original (an accurate port is the primary goal here).

A link to the source code is on the itch page, and various notes explain more about the process of getting this to work. I hope to expand the system and tools built for the project into something more generally useful to the fantasy console development community. Some interesting techniques are used to crunch everything down into the Pico-8 limitations, and further blog posts that detail what I discovered during this porting process are in the works.

https://christopherdrum.itch.io/mystery-house