Towers of Hanoi (1987)

Towers of Hanoi by Daniel Miller is a 1987 update of his 1985 Tower of Hanoi game of the same name.

While substantially the same, this game is much improved compared to its predecessor. The animation of the discs is much quicker, which cures the major problem with the previous game, and it also registers when you’ve won, rather than just going on forever. The game also beeps when moving discs, though that sound effect is quite primitive for 1987.

Towers of Hanoi was published in Loadstar #39, as well as Best of Loadstar #4. Hard to imagine a simple game like this being included in any kind of ‘best of’ compilation, but there it was.

Towers of Hanoi (1985)

Towers of Hanoi by Daniel Miller is a 1985 Tower of Hanoi game for the Commodore 64.

This is just your standard Tower of Hanoi game, with a couple of differences: first, it doesn’t seem to be able to tell when you’ve won, instead requiring the player to press F1 to quit; second, pressing F1 during play will offer the option of having the computer solve the puzzle.

The animation of the discs moving is quite slow, making it rather boring to solve–it takes fully seven seconds to move a disc from the bottom of the left stack to the bottom of the right stack.

This would just be a rather poor Tower of Hanoi game, worthy of no particular notice, if it weren’t for one thing. Towers of Hanoi was published in the June 1985 issue of Ahoy!, a magazine for Commodore users–in fact, it was mentioned on the cover–and the writeup for the game is really great. It gives Lucas’s story about the priests in the temple moving discs about, counting down to the end of the world; it discusses the number of moves required to solve the puzzle; and it also describes some programming tricks the game uses quite lucidly. It’s a lovely little article, the sort that I really enjoy reading. It’s just a pity it wasn’t attached to a better game.