There was a game called Tangled Tales which came out around 1989-1990. You were an apprentice who lost your powers because you pissed your teacher off about something. So you have to slowly gain them back by wandering around and solving various mysteries that involved well-known fantasy characters.
Unfortunately the game was buggy around level 5 and I could never finish it. Even traded it in for another disk and had the same problems.
The game was fun but I never got to finish it! Bleh.
Thank you so much for that! I downloaded it and beat it over the weekend! Its amazing how much stuff I remember from 10 years ago when I last played this game. Its every bit as fun and funny as it was before! 
Did you buy the Legend of Grimrock when it came out earlier this year? Its practically the sequel to Dungeon Master. You will recognize familiar puzzles from this game that was done on DM. I’d say that if you played DM, you will actually have a bit of advantage over people who never played DM
Might and Magic on the C-64.
Some I had tons of fun with:
Elite
Ultima
Empire (I think that was the name, it was a strategy game with square tiles.)
Civilization
Combat (Atari 2600)
Mail Order Monsters
Racing Destruction Set
Pool of Radiance
There is a remake of Elite out: http://www.oolite.org/
Ultima-type games are still around and of course there are the modern 3D types like Oblivion and Skyrim.
Pool of Radiance led to games like Dragon Age.
Civilization of course is still around, it’s up to Civ V now, and the streamlined but still fun Civilization Revolution on consoles.
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Some I had tons of fun with:
Empire (I think that was the name, it was a strategy game with square tiles./QUOTE]
Yes - in fact, the original used text characters instead of tiles, as it was designed for UNIX systems.
How old is “old school”? One of my favorites was Sundog: Frozen Legacy for the Atari ST.
I was also into the Alternate Reality “series” (which abruptly ended after two titles, only one of which was released to 16-bit machines).
I think you may be the first person I’ve heard of who liked the Hitchhiker game. Everyone I know says it was too hard, even for games back then.
I personally want to make a point-and-click version. Ideally it would still allow the old text controls if you wanted–but there’d be a speech to text interpreter built in.
I have a text game called Beyond the Titanic that you might want to play. Unfortunately, it’s not Infocom, so you need DOSBox to play it.
I also have this quaint little Christian text adventure game, which has you apparently being all the heroes in the Bible, including Jesus, despite just being some guy who woke up in a church with no memory. And it’s freeware, not just abandonware. It’s called Keys to the Kingdom.
Of the games y’all mention, Combat for the Atari is the only one I actually played as a kid. I missed out on nearly all the DOS games, as, during the DOS era, I had a Hercules Monochrome graphics card. Text-based was all I could play. Or Windows 3.1 games, like Kye. (I remember buying a Dick Tracy game and being unable to ever play it, so I learned not to buy games that were in color. I wish I’d known about CGA.EXE.)
It wasn’t so much “hard” as Adams had it do things that anybody who was familiar with any other Infocom games would never think of doing. For example, there’s one room where it says, “There is an exit to port” (it used fore/port/aft/starboard, at least when aboard the Heart of Gold), but the only exit is aft, and when you use it, it says, “We were kidding about the exit to port”; there is one room where you are told that you can’t enter, but you are expected to try to enter it again, and then when told that there is nothing there, you have to “look” two or three times before finding what you need.
The other problem I can think of (well, besides the fact that they never made a sequel) is…
Early in the game, you need to have your toothbrush with you when Earth is destroyed - otherwise, near the end of the game, Marvin will ask you for a toothbrush to fix something (actually, Marvin could ask you for one of something like a dozen items, and you needed to discover the way to see into the future to see what Marvin would do, but “the version I remember was,” if you didn’t have your toothbrush with you, he would always ask for that), but it doesn’t exist any more, so you can’t possibly win the game, and yet you are never told about this, so you might spend hours going over every possible detail, not realizing that the one thing you need no longer exists.
Ah, Scorched Earth! I shudder to think how may hours I spent playing that in college instead of studying. A few friends would be hanging around, and someone would say, “Scorch?”, and a night was down the tubes! Awesome!
I also used to play the old Mac game Spectre whenever I could get my grubby little hands on my hallmate’s Mac. For years, I’ve wished I could play it again. I see now it has an iOS version. Maybe I’ll give it a shot.
I had one of the mid-1970’s, pre-2600 Pong games from Sears. Couldn’t beat my sister, which pissed me off to no end.
My first computer game was Star Raiders for my Atari 400/800 (I had both). Also had Choplifter! and the Infocom games.
My first PC games were Civilization, A-Train, and Might and Magic: Clouds of Xeen, which I bought all in one day in 1992, 1993.
There’s also a Kickstarter by David Braben for a new version
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1461411552/elite-dangerous?ref=live
Elite and the Ultimas were the big ones for me on PC, I recall Utopia fondly on the Intellivision–probably the height of my ability to play RTS games.
And I still have my old Vetrex, along with the 3D goggles accessory.
Online, I started gaming on CompuServe in the mid-80s with SeaWar, then spent way too much time and money on Megawars I over several years.
Utopia was awesome. I always wished it had more offensive options rather than just randomly placing rebels on the enemy island.
Back in the day, you would gladly grind a game like this for eternity. So, it didn’t matter so much that if you missed picking something up at the beginning you couldn’t win later, because we’d eventually worry the solution out. Also, in my household we had three people working on the problem. We never actually finished the game because of a last-minute issue with getting through the Haughty Door. Years later, somebody mentioned something that allowed me to suss a solution out, but even still I don’t think it was too hard even though I’d hardly have the patience nowadays when there are six million games to play to find the solution, and I’ll tell you why: Discworld. Discworld makes Hitch-hiker’s look like Towers of Hanoi.
Oh heck, where do I start. I got hooked on the old Pong-style dedicated devices. Then we got one that had a tank game in addition to the Pong. Had an Atari 2600, VIC-20, C-64, Commodore Amiga, then finally got into Windows in 1995.
Most of the games since Pong are a blur. One game I loved on the Amiga was The Lurking Horror. There’s a board member here that goes by that name, but I don’t think I ever had the opportunity to ask about any connection with the game. It was an old-style text adventure, with the notable addition of spooky sound effects. The sound REALLY added to the atmosphere, and I’m sorry that no one did much more with that. Given that it used Lovecraft as a basis for the game, it was très spooky. I spent more time on my Amiga programming than gaming. I also got my start in playing with computer graphics in Deluxe Paint, something I dabble in to this day.
On my 2600, Missile Command was a fav. It was one of the few that, honestly, didn’t look like complete ass. There was a maze game called Wizard of Wor. Loved that game, and I’d play it for over an hour without seeing, “Game Over.” A couple times I turned over the point counter, and according to a magazine I had, I beat the world record by about 20%. No one to see it, no picture taken, oh well. 
When I first got my c-64, I stayed up all night playing Castle Wolfenstein & Zork. Teenage computer geek heaven! Other favs were Saucer Attack, which looked awesome (for a c64), Beach-Head and Raid on Bungling Bay.
Since moving to a Windows platform, it’s been a nonstop parade of first-person-shooters, with some first-person RPGs thrown in. Wolfenstein 3D, Duke Nukem 3D, Doom, Quake, Unreal Tournament, and a whole hell of a lot of Battlefield 2. The past couple years has been mainly Dungeons & Dragons Online, Fallout 3 & New Vegas, Borderlands 1 & 2, and hopefully soon, Skyrim.
I got an Amiga copy of this game for a song from a bargain bin, along with the Infocom Sherlock Holmes. Even now Lurking Horror forms my main sense of what Lovecraft was like. I don’t recall if any of the gimmicks in the game – the student ID card and whatnot – that came in the game held important clues as they did in the Sherlock Holmes game, but I was glad to have them.
The oldest game that I consistently play, even today, is 1982’s Robotron: 2084, which I bought in cabinet form at Target 5-odd years ago.
Target sells arcade machines in their retail stores? Or was it something they had set up in the lobby for kids, then they decided to get rid of it and sell it? How much does something like that run?
What kid of the 80’s didn’t want their own arcade machine?
I got me one of these. Also plays Defender, Joust, Sinistar, Wizard of Wor, Rampage, and a bunch of “lesser” games.
Arcade machines can be surprisingly inexpensive, maybe 3 or 4 hundred for common ones like Ms. Pac Man.
That’s pretty kick-ass, and those are some of my favorite games, but shame on you for lumping Satan’s Hollow in the “lesser games” category! It reminds me of the nicer MAME arcade cabinets people have made to house a computer & monitor.