With all the great in-browser software emulation emerging over the last few years I thought I’d take a cue from Jim regarding The Prisoner game released for Apple II and see if I could find an emulated version.

30 minutes into my search I not only found .dsk files for both The Prisoner and The Prisoner 2, but a great piece from The Digital Antiquarian that digs into the backstory of the game developments.  Some great bits:

It consists of some 30 individual BASIC programs which are shuffled in and out of memory as needed by a machine-language routine, the only non-BASIC part of the structure.

 

Throughout all this the game is constantly trying to get us to reveal our resignation code, through ploys obvious and subtle. The most devious of all comes when we visit the Hospital. In the midst of an absurd free-association personality test, we are suddenly dropped to BASIC with an apparent error message. The natural reaction to the above would be to LIST line 943 to see what the problem might be. If we do, however, we have just lost. The number 943 is of course our resignation code, and we have just been tricked into revealing it. There was never any real error at all; we are still in the program. We are still the Prisoner.

There isn’t much different between ‘The Prisoner’ and ‘The Prisoner II’ – story is essentially the same with ‘The Prisoner II’ adding a first person perspective to the maze/map puzzles.

If you are digging #prisoner106 give ‘The Prisoner’ a shot by downloading this prisoner.dsk file and loading it into this javascript-powered Apple II emulator.

‘The Prisoner II’ is available at archive.org and offered via MESS below: