Say what you want about the state of modern gaming, but the insurance policy of instantly downloadable patches may make developers less cautious about releasing finished products, but at least the games will be playable at some point.

This was not the case with Arctic Adventure, a text adventure written by the then 17-year-old Harry McCracken (now technical editor of Fast Company).

The game, which McCracken says he was "deeply indebted to Scott Adams' wonderful adventure," was originally distributed in a book called The Captain 80 Book of Basic Adventures, and for interested people to play it, the TRS-80 It was from a time when code had to be physically typed into a microcomputer. In this case, the code was five pages long, no small task.

McCracken never received a copy of the book himself, although he was paid for his work, and the only feedback he received was that someone at the publisher "grumpily informed me that a bug had made my game unwinnable."

Decades later, as PCGamer reported, McCracken obtained a copy of the book online; after painstakingly entering his code into the iPad's TRS emulator, he discovered that the employee had underestimated the bug: "The game is not only unwinnable, it is play impossible."

This was due to a single missing zero in the string, which may sound like a small bug but was devastating. McCracken writes, "It was so fundamental a glitch that it rendered the game's English controls inoperable." 'I couldn't even get the shovel, let alone complete the adventure.'

For those who were disappointed that they were unable to play Arctic Adventure in 1981, there is good news. McCracken has now fixed the bug and the game can be played in your browser without having to enter five pages of code.

McCracken has made some adjustments to the difficulty of the puzzles, making it more like a director's cut than the original release, but you won't find too many significant changes.

There are also a few modest concessions for those born after 1990 who never experienced the simple pleasure of typing "go north" on the command line. McCracken explains, "There are new conveniences like support for lowercase input and the ability to navigate with a single letter command like W instead of typing GO WEST."

"Oh, and we've removed some well-intentioned but not too outdated phrases about Eskimos."

McCracken also added a dog that follows you around, apparently essential to completing the game; unfortunately I could not fully confirm whether the "Can You Pet the Dog" Twitter account would be interested.

But most elements are left intact, including the absurd logic that it is perfectly normal to wear a warm coat over a diving suit. McCracken admits, "And I'm not sure that if you mapped all the locations, their orientation to each other would be entirely logical."

Still, it's a heartwarming story of someone returning to a long-forgotten project, and it didn't take long for his old TRS-80 BASIC coding muscle memory to fire up all cylinders again. McCracken writes, "I was amazed that most of the commands came right back to the table when I needed them."

To play Arctic Adventure and read an interesting blog post documenting the excavation, click here.