Not every classic is remembered for being groundbreaking. Some earn their place simply by surviving, and Supernova has survived unusually well for a 1987 text adventure, partly because its own creators eventually opened its source code to the world.
Scott Miller’s second act in text adventures
Supernova was designed by Scott Miller and released by Apogee Software in 1987, the same year as Kingdom of Kroz, placing it firmly in the company’s earliest wave of releases, before the graphical action games that would later define Apogee’s identity. It puts players in the role of a miner on a distant colony, desperate to escape a dull, grueling existence and find something better among the stars.
Years after its release, Supernova’s source code was made available under an open license, an unusually generous move that’s helped cement its place as a piece of deliberately preserved PC gaming history rather than just another abandoned shareware title.
That kind of preservation is rarer than it should be for games this old. Most shareware titles from the mid-80s survive today only because enthusiast archives happened to keep a copy circulating, not because their original creators actively chose to keep them accessible. Supernova is one of the exceptions, and it’s part of why it’s held up better as a piece of documented history than plenty of its better-known contemporaries.
A parser adventure with a science-fiction voice
Players interact with Supernova entirely through typed commands, exploring the mining colony and its surroundings, examining objects, and issuing actions to push the story forward. The parser recognizes a fairly broad vocabulary for its era, and on-screen status information helps track progress as the player works toward a way off the colony.
As with any text adventure, success depends on careful reading and experimentation rather than reflexes, with points awarded for reaching key milestones and solving the puzzles standing between the miner and escape. The science-fiction setting gives it a different flavor from the fantasy and mystery themes that dominated most contemporary text adventures.
The scoring system in particular is a nice touch for a game this old. Rather than a binary win-or-lose state, Supernova tracks incremental progress, giving players a sense of forward motion even during a session where the actual escape from the colony still feels a long way off.
Playing it smart
- Check your status display regularly; Supernova tracks progress in ways that aren’t always obvious from room descriptions alone.
- Try simple, common verbs first (look, take, use) before assuming a puzzle needs an obscure command.
- Read item descriptions closely on pickup. Mining-colony equipment often has a use that isn’t obvious from its name.
- Save before any action that sounds risky or irreversible; 1980s text adventures were rarely forgiving about permanent mistakes.
- Take note of any recurring characters or locations the parser mentions more than once; Supernova tends to flag important elements through repetition rather than obvious emphasis.
Where it fits in Apogee’s early catalog
Set next to Beyond the Titanic, Supernova is the more confident, more mechanically developed of Miller’s early text adventures, with a broader parser and a clearer sense of pacing. It’s a useful marker of how quickly the format matured even within Apogee’s own catalog, right before the company pivoted hard toward graphical, arcade-style action games.
The mining-colony setup also gives it a slightly different emotional register than most parser fiction of the period. Rather than a wizard’s tower or a haunted house, you’re stuck in a grinding, unglamorous job, which lends the escape narrative a working-class edge that fantasy-themed text adventures of the same era rarely bothered with.
That grounded framing also shapes the puzzle design in subtle ways. Rather than magic items or spellbooks, Supernova leans on mining equipment and colony infrastructure for its obstacles, which forces a more grounded, mechanically logical style of problem-solving than a lot of contemporary fantasy text adventures required. It’s a small thing, but it gives the game a distinct identity within a fairly crowded field of mid-80s parser fiction.
Getting your copy
New to DOSBox? Our complete setup guide walks through everything you need, and our roundup of free DOS games has more from this era if text adventures turn out to be your thing.
Running Supernova in DOSBox
Extract the files to their own folder, mount it with mount c [folder], switch to it using c:, and run the EXE from the DOS prompt. It should run smoothly on default cycle settings since there’s no graphics rendering to speak of; our DOSBox guide above can help with anything unusual you run into.
Final thoughts
Supernova won’t win over players who bounce off text parsers on principle, and some of its vocabulary quirks will still trip up newcomers to the format. But it’s a valuable piece of Apogee’s earliest history, offering a look at Scott Miller’s work before the company became synonymous with Duke Nukem and Commander Keen, and its open-source status makes it an especially easy piece of history to explore firsthand.
I find myself recommending it more for context than pure entertainment value, and I think that’s a fair way to approach it. Play Kingdom of Kroz or Beyond the Titanic first if you want a sense of Apogee’s range in this era, then come back to Supernova to see the format at its most refined before the company left text adventures behind for good.
Watch Gameplay
You might also like:
