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.

Stack

Stack by Glenn W. Zuch is a 1985 Tower of Hanoi game for the Commodore 64 with stunningly bad design.

I’ve opened this on a rather strong assertion, but it’s really deserved. For all the games I’ve reviewed so far, the worst thing you could really say about them was that they were unoriginal, boring, and ugly. Certainly flaws, but totally common ones and not entirely the fault of the authors.

Stack takes badness one step further–or a dozen. Behold:

Both the bars and the stacks are numbered, and rather than, as with every previous Tower of Hanoi game, selecting the source and destination stacks, you first select the bar you want to move, and then the stack you want to move it to. So solving the two-bar game, involves moving bar 9 to stack 2, bar 11 to stack 3, and then bar 9 to stack 3. Why weren’t the bars numbered 1 to 5 instead of 3, 5, 7, 9, 11? Who knows. But that’s not even the worst of it. Observe the game when a few moves have been made:

Each time you make a move, Stack redraws the stacks below the old ones, but it doesn’t tell you what the numbers are. So, you’ve got to keep in mind that in this case the medium sized bar is number 9, when you want to move it. How much worse it would be with five bars.

This is a horrible design choice with really no excuse. It’s a poor decision even if you’ve never seen a Tower of Hanoi game before, but by 1985 there were plenty of better examples.

This was a type-in game in the December 1985 issue of RUN (Issue #24), and the description there is priceless. It was written, I presume, by the author of the game, and repeats how easy the game is to play, while the underlying puzzle is difficult–not quite. Best of all is the one-sentence blurb introducing Stack: “Moving a few bars from one pile to another sounds easy, until you try this game.”

Yeah, that sounds about right.

Hanoi (1984)

In 1984, a final (to my knowledge) update to Glen Fisher’s Hanoi was released, also called Hanoi.

The gameplay is identical to its predecessors from 1978 and 1980. The only difference is that this 1984 version includes color–quite a bit more than the 1980 version, and in contrast to the monochromatic 1978 version.

I suppose that this version is the best of this lineage, which isn’t really saying much. Of course, for a Tower of Hanoi game, there isn’t much to say.

This version was released as a type-in game in Commodore 64 Fun and Games by Jeffries, Fisher, and Sawyer.