The source is terse as you describe, some parts are written in assembly, and strings are actually one big string with functions that extract substrings. There isn't a clear PRINT statement in the whole program.
All of this because he wanted the source to fit on one floppy.
I recently helped someone open source a roguelike they wrote in the 90s - https://github.com/superjamie/alphaman-src
The source is terse as you describe, some parts are written in assembly, and strings are actually one big string with functions that extract substrings. There isn't a clear PRINT statement in the whole program.
All of this because he wanted the source to fit on one floppy.