In Primary School (Elementary School to everyone in the States) we had Commodore 64 machines that did nothing but load educational software like Bank Street Writer and this game:

It was Gold Dust Island and it taught me a lot about life.

Gold-Dust Island was, as far as I can tell, written in Australia by Roseanne Dare and Philip O’Carroll for the Jacaranda Wiley publishing corporation, and released on the C64, Apple 2 and BBC Micro. It looks and behaves like it was written in BASIC, and I’d love to pore through the source code one day. It’s a multiplayer game for between two and five players, all of which have been stranded on a desert island with a small amount of supplies and the need to survive and escape.

There’s only three locations on the island, each with their own function. There’s the gold fields, which can be mined for gold, the water well, which is where (surprise) you get more water, and the boat building area, devoted to the art and science of building a boat to get off the island with. Each player starts the game with a random assortment of tools that are useful in only one of those areas and so they can work towards the goals of getting rich, hoarding supplies or escaping before the deadly storms roll in.

There’s not a lot to do in the game, but it’s sort of compelling in its own way. Every player can choose on their turn to move around, “trade” items between nearby players, get water, dig for gold or build. The more relevant items they have, the more effective they’ll be at the task at hand.

Well, I say “trade” but there’s really no trading functionality in the game – you just give items to other players and get nothing in return. I guess the developer was hoping there’d be some kind of social contract in play in front of the computer which I can tell you was not honoured in the school room.

The game ended up teaching me about how to get people to work together. The trick to this game is that working towards your own ends will quickly result in your demise (and there’s a cute little graveyard left on the game map forever) so you need to work as a team to survive. Even as a kid I thought it was interesting how we all eventually settled into the pattern of taking on specific roles – one person would build boats, one person would ferry water back and forth around the map and whoever was remaining would assist or mine for gold to be rich after they escape the island. It was just like LOST, but with kids that weren’t as annoying as Walt.

Anyway, try it out if you get a chance. It’s definitely not the flashiest game you can spend your time on but I think it still holds up today.