For those who like their text adventures (or just want to try some unique little games) the 2006 Interactive Fiction competition is now in its judging period.
Every year dozens of amatuer game designers and writers put together text adventures and send them out into the world to be judged. People download them, play them for two hours, and then rate them on a scale of one to ten. There’s a lot of junk in the competition but there’s always one or two gems hidden in there too.
I have little interest in text adventures, but one of my friends competed in 1996 (and did very well in the competition). So, it’s kinda neat to see that the competition is still going strong.
Most text adventures these days are done as code for a virtual machine so that they’ll run on any platfrom from a Commodore 64 to a supercomputer. The two most popular are Z-machine (such as the z8 you found), is based on Infocom’s system and TADS which is it’s own beast. If you’re not using a Mac or Windows, then you’ll want to download an interpreter for your platform from http://www.ifarchive.org . The most popular Z-machine one is Frotz and it’s been ported to pretty much everything and it’s section of the archive is at Index: if-archive/infocom/interpreters/frotz .
I remember playing some amateur IF games a few years ago. Some of them are great. The past winners can be found here. If anyone’s interested I can recommend some of the specific games I really liked.