Who loved and maybe still loves those old school interactive fiction games?
I actually downloaded an emulator that plays the games on my phone which has way more juice than a Radio Shack Tandy ever did, I love those games so much.
Who else recalls reading the New Zork Times? Who remembers typing 'XYZZY" to see that happened? Any of you deviants finish “Leather Goddesses of Phobos?” Fess up!
My game then was “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, did not have much back then, but once I got a job, I was one of those kids that got a personal computer (Commodore 64) first before getting a car 
, and the version for that computer was one of the early games that I played for hours. Good times. Available for free to play on your browser over here:
And, yes, Zork is there too:
Sadly, no Leather Goddess of Phobos there, but: Search with Google for:
" archive.org leather goddesses of Phobos online " To get the link to play it in the Internet Archive. (NSFW of course!)
I have very fond memories of A Mind Forever Voyaging. Created as a criticism of the 80s political atmosphere, it seems pretty damn prescient and even more applicable today.
Besides commercial games, it is worth looking at the (amateur) competition winners over the years. ifcomp.org Some of them are quite good.
I’ve played Colossal Cave many times. Plugh…
I still use the phrase “maze of twisty little passages, all alike.”
About 6 years ago, when my kid was about 9, I introduced him to Colossal Cave Adventure (for me, circa 1982, it was just Adventure), and he genuinely enjoyed it, for an hour or two. I wanted to make sure his living memory (via mine) bridged history all the way back to the earliest days of home computers.
Yes. I love how your first challenge is to use the bathroom, and which one you pick sets your gender for the game.
Also the “T” Remover.
I have Frotz on my iPhone which lets me play a bunch of those old text-based games.
The step up that King’s Quest was for many of us is difficult to describe.
I played one that my brother and I enjoyed, but we have NEVER been able to find it. First action of the game was to go, let’s say “east”, and the text said. “Looks like a storm’s a brewin’.”
We’ve never found it. It might have been a Big Blue Disk game, but I’ve looked at those titles and nothing clicked.
My first was probably the Polarware re-release of Oo-Topos with glorious CGA graphics. I was far too young at the time for it and mostly watched Dad playing it. I finally beat it (well, with some help from a solution guide) many years later having had to emulate it in DOSBox.
The whole thing. Didn’t ever look up hints, either.
Although the Catacombs can go fuck themselves with the stupid clap/hop/kweepa thing because tracking three “timed” events simultaneously and trying to not end up with two or even all three actions needing to be accomplished on the same turn was annoying.
King’s Quest was one of the first computer games, of any sort, I ever played. Possibly the very first, if one separates out video game consoles from computers. There are probably still some hand-drawn maps of it in some dusty drawer in Mom’s house. It wasn’t until many years later that I learned of its predecessors.
The _____ Quest games changed radically (and not, I think, for the better) when they later went to point-and-click instead of text.
Somewhere down in the basement I have a box of “Lost Treasures of Infocom” with twenty classic text-based games. I think I’ve started all of them at least once, not sure I ever finished any of them.
Zork was the first computer game I bought for my old Kaypro PC. I remember spending hours with a pad of graph paper trying to map those twisty passages. One good thing about the “Lost Treasures” boxed set is that all the games came with maps.
I spent a huge amount of time playing Zork. And finished it, along with some sequels.
I spent some time with hitchhikers guide to the galaxy, and leather goddess of phobos, but o didn’t think i finished them.
I also played Advent, on a teletype terminal. That was soooo cooool.
I played most of these as a teen and have most of them for DosBox, though now when I play, I print out the maps.
I played Spider-man and Pac-man on the Atari 2600 first, but we got a computer when I was in 3rd grade, so it was a game changer. Even with CGA graphics, it was a huge step up from the 2600.
Our computer that was EGA later was an even bigger leap.
I started those with Return to Zork, which actually came with all the text adventure Zorks on a disk. What a bonus!
Was it even possible to map, per se, the maze of twisty passages? There were plenty of cases where the direction connecting two rooms was not reciprocal, or other topological oddities. I found that the only workable approach was a directed-graph table: Every room, I dropped a different item, and added a line to a table, with columns for the identifying item and ten more columns for all the directions the room could (potentially) be exited by. Whenever I came to a room that already had one of my items, I marked the table accordingly. Whenever I came to an empty room, I dropped another item and added a row.
I am reading yes, but it is non-Euclidean.
Which seems like should just say, “No, not really.”
Yes. I mapped it by indicating that some passages were one way. There are lots of maps that include one way streets.
Oh, sure, if that were the only issue, you could do that. But there are too many places where you go from A to B by going north, and then B to A by going north, or where East-East-East loops you back to where you started, or the like. In principle, you could still force it all onto a 2-D map (by putting curved arrows between the rooms), but it’d be an extremely messy 2D map at best, and even worse if you picked the wrong projection.