At a glance: Pirate’s Cove · VIC-20 · Commodore, 1981 · Text adventure · Score: 7.5/10
Pirate’s Cove — Scott Adams’ Pirate Adventure, the second of his legendary adventure series, renamed for its Commodore cartridge release — swaps The Count’s gothic castle for salt air and buried gold, and it remains the most purely fun of the VIC-20’s text adventures. You start in a London flat with a book, a parrot-shaped problem and a map-shaped destiny: sail to Treasure Island, build what you need, outwit the island’s hazards, and bring the pirate’s hoard home. Adams wrote it in his signature compressed style — two-word commands, brisk descriptions, puzzles nested like Russian dolls — and Commodore’s cartridge brought it to the VIC-20 in the machine’s first adventure wave, alongside Adventureland and The Count. If those games proved the VIC could think, Pirate’s Cove proved it could grin.
Yo ho, in two words
The design is a model of Adams’ economy. The world is small — an apartment, a harbour, an island — but every location is load-bearing, and the central puzzle chain, preparing and building your means of reaching and leaving the treasure, is one of the most satisfying constructions in early adventure gaming. Objects combine, the parrot matters more than parrots should, and the island’s dangers — crocodiles, snakes, tides of misfortune — are placed with a fairness that invites experimentation rather than punishing it. The famous Adams touch is present throughout: solutions that seem obvious the moment after you find them, and a parser that, for all its two-word limits, rarely leaves you guessing the verb for long. It is friendlier than The Count, and deliberately so — this was the series’ populariser, the adventure that converted the curious.
On the VIC-20, the 22-column screen wraps Adams’ prose into dense little scrolls that suit the game’s paperback energy, and the cartridge format — instant on, no tape loading — makes it the easiest of the early adventures to dip into. Judged specifically against its VIC siblings, Pirate’s Cove is the best first adventure on the machine: clearer goals than Adventureland, warmer company than The Count, and a treasure at the end that makes the voyage feel like a voyage. The limitations are the family’s: the vocabulary is small, some puzzle logic is pure 1979, and an experienced adventurer will finish in an evening or two. But what evenings.
The friendliest adventure
Pirate’s Cove also documents a lovely moment in software history — the era when one programmer’s imagination, folded into a few kilobytes, could be a bestselling world. Adams’ adventures were the VIC-20’s window onto the wider microcomputer culture of the TRS-80 and Apple, and Commodore’s decision to cartridge them gave VIC owners the canon in its most convenient form. Playing it now, what survives best is the tone: this is an adventure that likes you, that wants you to find the treasure, and that hides its cleverness in plain sight rather than behind cruelty.
Bring a map, mind the parrot, and dig in the right place. Pirate’s Cove is a small classic of the form, and the VIC-20 version is as good a way to play it as any ever sold.
Treasure, mapped
A practical word for modern buccaneers, because Pirate’s Cove rewards being played the old way. Draw the map. The game’s geography is small but deliberately disorienting — the island is not where the flat is, the harbour logic takes a run to learn — and Adams designed for a player with paper, in an era when mapping was half the hobby. Played with a notebook, the adventure unfolds as its author intended: exploration first, understanding second, and then the long, satisfying chain of preparations clicking into place like a lock. Played by wandering, it can feel arbitrary. The difference is not the game’s fairness; it is the ritual, and the ritual is half the treasure. Few VIC-20 cartridges make so strong a case for the pencil as a gaming peripheral.
The other half of the case is the tone, which deserves its reputation. Pirate’s Cove is the Adams adventure that smiles — the parrot’s presence, the romance of the island, the sheer storybook clarity of digging up a pirate’s hoard. In a modern library of grimdark epics, a game this cheerful about its quest feels almost radical, and on the friendly computer it feels inevitable. This was the machine’s adventure for everyone, and everyone, given an evening and a map, still finds the gold.
In the slot today
The VIC edition’s place in the Adams catalogue deserves its sentence of record: these cartridges were many players’ first text adventures anywhere, because Commodore put them in the shops where the machines were sold, at the moment the machines were bought. Pirate’s Cove, as the friendliest of the set, was therefore a gateway in the literal sense — the first parser thousands of players ever typed into, the first map they ever drew, the first treasure they ever dug. Gateway works carry a responsibility, and this one discharged it perfectly: nobody who started here was scared off the genre. A generation of adventurers has this cartridge to thank for its first YO HO.
It remains the recommendation this review would hand a newcomer in 2026, ahead of bigger and cleverer adventures on grander machines, because its lessons are the genre’s lessons taught kindly: read everything, map honestly, trust the parrot. The treasure at the end is almost incidental. Almost. It is, after all, a pirate’s hoard, and some things a reviewer should not pretend not to care about.
A parting chart for the voyage, in the form of the game’s own arithmetic: one flat, one book, one parrot, one boat to build, one island to master, one hoard to haul home. Adams wastes nothing, and neither does the VIC cartridge that carries him — no loading sagas, no disk swaps, just the story, instant at switch-on, in the machine that made a generation’s first adventures convenient. If the measure of a classic is how completely it achieves its intentions, Pirate’s Cove is a classic entire: it intended delight, delivered it in a few kilobytes, and has gone on delivering it, unchanged and unhurried, for over forty years. The tide, as noted, is right. Sail.
An adventure that likes you — Pirate’s Cove hides its cleverness in plain sight rather than behind cruelty.
Pirate’s Cove is the warmest, most approachable of the VIC-20’s Scott Adams cartridges and one of the best introductions to classic text adventuring anywhere. Its puzzles are fair, its world is charmingly economical, and its treasure is worth the sailing. Recommended for adventurers old and new.
Verdict: build the boat, trust the parrot, dig deep. A small classic, sailing on.
Verdict’s postscript, then: of the three Adams cartridges Commodore gave the VIC, this is the one to start a newcomer on and the one veterans name with the warmest nostalgia. The tide is right, the parrot is restless, and the X is exactly where it always was. Dig.