What happened to the great text based games like Zork or Adventure? I imagine at some point they tried to make them graphical user interface. I’m not sure how I would like that. I like the way that you could almost “talk” to the machine. You just used a verb then a noun. Sometimes the machine knew what you meant, sometimes it didn’t. Part of the pleasure was figuring out what commands it knew and what objects you could do things with.
Are there any contemporary versions of these games? They couldn’t be too difficult to program, there must be fans that program them.
Nothing happens.
In 1993 they came out with Return to Zork. It was graphical, but not 3D. The NPCs were movie clips superimposed on the background. But it was kind of fun. Like all the Zork games it had a lot of atmosphere.
I loved text adventure games as a child. I solved Zork III at nine years old and HHGTTG at ten. They are no longer made commercially but don’t think that they are dead at all. New ones are produced all the time and they are generally available for free and there are still Interactive Fiction contests. The classic ones are generally easy to find as well.
You mean like a MUD? Those are multiplayer versions, which vary in theme from fantasy to sci-fi to whatever.
There was a further update to the Zork opus, Zork: Grand Inquisitor. It was a lot of fun, and built on the mythos, such as it is, fairly consistently.
It was, however, graphical, so I now see it wasn’t what you’re looking for.
makes mental note: read OP carefully
After that, they came out with Zork Nemesis, which had great puzzles, but took itself far too seriously. Again, it had movie clips. I really didn’t care for that one. I did like the last one I played, which was Zork: Grand Inquisitor. THAT one was fun. It was 3D, had movie clips, and a sense of humor. I’m gonna have to dig it out again and play it. I have to admit, the Goatfish had me banging my head against a wall, but it was funny, too. Zork Nemesis doesn’t seem to take place in the regular Zork universe, but ZGI has a Flathead, spell scrolls (and a spellbook), and a generally wacky way of looking at things.
Commercial text adventures may be dead, but there are plenty of talented amateurs still writing them. Behold the The Interactive Fiction Archive.
Commercial text adventures died to a changing marketplace and advancing technology. Advent a.k.a. Colossal Caverns was the first text adventure game, played on mainframe computers it quickly spread around the world. As home computers became more popular the people who played it adopted that style to the games they made for their own computers.
In 1980 there were numerous competing personal computers each with their own standard of graphics. The only common feature between all of them was text and so if someone wanted to make a game that could be easily ported to different platforms then text was a good medium to work with.
Also, the computer market was very different in the early 80’s than it is today. It was just about entirely nerds and highly educated professionals; people who would have a much higher tolerance for reading the story than the masses.
By 1984 things were already shifting away from text adventures. Sierra On-Line was pioneering the graphical adventures that they’d become known for and many companies were experimenting with adding images to their adventure games even if they played like text adventures. As the PC market became more homogenized a company could make quite a bit of money writing for just one or two platforms and graphics simply got more attention in the growing marketplace than text.
Infocom, the creators of Zork, was one of the last holdouts but in their final days they created graphical adventures as well (notably Zork Zero which was still a Zork text adventure but had VGA graphics for the PC). The nail in the coffin for Infocom were some very bad business decisions involving a corporate database product. Eventually the remains of Infocom would be purchased by Activision who would release some games that were sequels in name only.
The market may be dead for commercial text adventures but as noted there is a community of individuals creating their own text adventures. Graham Nelson, the man who reverse-engineered Infocom’s format in order to allow people to create new games in that style, has written a very detailed history of text adventures if you’re interested in more. It can be found at http://www.inform-fiction.org/manual/Chapter8.pdf .
They were lost in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Or perhaps it was a twisty little maze of passages, all alike.
They were eaten by a grue.
Infocom’s load was too heavy.
Funny you should mention this. About a month ago I was digging through some old boxes in the basement and found my “Lost Treasures of Infocom”, which I had completely forgotten about. (“Lost Treasures” indeed!) It was a box of 20 text adventure games that Infocom sold in a single package about 15 years ago. So I blew the dust off and installed it on my PC and have been trying to get through Zork again without peeking at the hint book.
I had no idea people were still writing this stuff.
I played a bunch of them a few years ago, and there’s some truly great games from the amateur IF community. I think that this site is better for finding games. There are some truly great games, ranging from more traditional adventure games to interesting experimental type games.
Here are a few that I can remember really liking:
Anchorhead, a great Lovecraft inspired game.
Slouching Towards Bedlam, I don’t remember much of what it was about, but it was good.
Spider and Web, a brilliantly conceived and executed game. You’ll see for yourself if you try it out.
I gotta play some of these games again.
I wonder if the graphical ones would satisfy my nead for free thought. What are some good ones that I could get for Mac OS X?
There’s a tribute to Zork as part of the game in kingdomofloathing.com
I can’t find my “Lost Treasures of Infocom” 
I think it might have gone with an exboyfriend.
I used to live near a small dam which I ALWAYS called “flood control dam #3” to the eternal confusion of my friends.
In addition to “Zork Zero” which others had mentioned, a prior title, “Beyond Zork” had very basic graphics (limited to a scematic map of your immediate zone) and also tried to incorprate more of a RPG element with player stats.
I used to get “The New Zork Times” – I guess they got a cease-and-desist because at some point it became “The Status Line” then just disappeared.
I always thought Zork style text adventure games evolved into graphical adventure games. Then adventure games pretty much fell off the face of the Earth. They just don’t make many games like King’s Quest or Gabriel Knight these days. A few, but not many.
Marc
Just looking at the King’s Quest series you can kind of see the evolution from text based to graphical games.
There are some advantages to text based games though, so I wouldn’t consider them rendered obsolete by graphical games.
As for recent adventure games, the first episode of the new Sam & Max game is out. I haven’t played it yet, but I’ve heard it’s pretty good.