Man, that's a wild story. On the one hand, I'm desperately curious to know what the truth about St. Bride's is; on the other hand, I'm sort of glad that there are still (or recently were) weird and unapologetic places like this that don't feel the need to explain themselves.
That latter article would make a great HN submission in its own right! If you post it, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll put it in the second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool, explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308). It's best to wait a while, though, perhaps a couple months, to let the hivemind caches clear.
A few years before the turn of the millennium, I took a year out before university, and spent some time travelling around the country (I'm from the UK) and working in exchange for board.
A lot of communes which had been established in the 1970s and 80s were still extant, and visiting was fascinating and an absolute blast. Few of them still remain, and those which do have distinctly toned down, moving from howling at the moon, orgone accumulators and three day sundances to straight ecological workshops. Bit of a shame, really.
Sometimes I feel a little sad that I don't have a couple of extra lifetimes (or the patience) to really dig in to even a small percentage of the fascinating games that have been made over the years.
I mean, of course most of them are not like exceptional like this one, but that still leaves hundreds of not thousands that are certainly very interesting.
This was a great article (I read it last week). It's nice that there are a lot of playthroughs of these adventures on youtube, here's on for St Bride's "Very Big Cave Adventure": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_x0LmeWhXTk
Back in the 80s, there would be no help sheet for a game like this (excluding some of Infocoms larger games). The idea is that you just try loads of different actions until something happens.
Ok so... after bit of fiddling I've deduced that the basic movement is 'GO <direction>' and also 'Leave' so I'm guessing 'Enter' works as well. Frustratingly, the delete/backspace key doesn't work in the Emulator.
But the first command is quite brilliantly, 'GET LAMP'[1].
The game itself is very 'Hobbit' in style with the drawing of the locations.
