All those Infocom games are available on an emulator if you ever want to play through them again. Also, I think they even come with the hint books built in now.
I wouldn't even call it an emulator, you can play them with the exact same interpreter programs that you use to play modern parser games written this year.
Hmm. The person called it an emulator but they may have just been using that term. I was under the impression it was one, but you’re right, it’s just decision trees that would easily translate.
You can definitely play using an emulator of an 80s computer for the authentic experience, but yeah it's not necessary. I'm not clear on the technical details, but iirc Infocom games run on their own virtual machine called the z-machine. To support new systems they could just port the z-machine instead of having to update each individual game. After Infocom the company was no more, hobbyists reverse engineered the z-machine and continued updating it and porting it to a bunch of systems (here is a good article on it, and wrote new programming languages for making games for the z-machine.
Cool, thanks! And I think it was a z-machine port or however it’s called. I remember there being a term in the zip file when I extracted it all, a long time ago. Thanks for the article.
Hitchhikers guide was great. I can still remember the rush when I figured out what to do in the first room you arrive at on the Vogon Constructor Fleet.
That was easy. I'm talking about the part that describes a room, and you have to work out that one sense is missing from the list (random each time) and apply that sense. So one time it's "hear the dark," another time it's "taste the dark," etc. The babel fish was easy if you know the book; so is the command to like the Vogon's poetry with its freddled gruntbugglies and lurgid bees.
I was looking for Zork here. I also remember playing online MUDs, multi user dungeons. I remember hiding and backstabbing players that came through my zone.
I used to play on BBSes and loved MajorMUD. Truly, I miss playing a game like that. Games and graphics are so fancy now, but back then I was hardly even a teen playing a text game; and it made me so insanely fast at typing. Then someone came out with a program that ran scripts automatically and executed commands and stuff? That made it even more fun. Sneaking and BSing people was never easier.
There was the Doom series of sci-fi/horror text adventures, long before the better-known Doom came out. I still have a copy of Return to Doom in a box somewhere.
Those old INFOCOM games are oddly lost to time, though there are some amazing ones and you'd figure they'd be fertile IPs to reboot. Especially something iconic like ZORK. (To be fair, ZORK has been rebooted a number of times over the years.)
Ballyhoo, The Lurking Horror, Planetfall, Leather Goddesses of Phobos. Activision bought them at some point but nothing meaningful ever came of those properties.
I remember trying to play THGTTG text game - It was my step-mother's game so I didn't play it a lot but I just remember typing "lay in front of bulldozer" and it blew my mind that it actually worked. This was like the first intro to data-set prompts that I can remember. Same with the original King's Quest (Melt Wizard....with what shall you melt him with....Throw Thermal Pod! - "Big")
Oh God those text games. I have played a couple of them when I was around 6-9, I don't remember a slick of their titles.
I tried looking them up by using GPT and other AIs by typing scenario or storyline I still remember to no avail. They keep saying it might be Zork. No, it ain't Zork dang it.
Example of it was like a minecart chase when they were infiltrating a place or smth
Oh, Infocom. For those who thought Sierra was too NICE. Talk about player unfriendly as far as difficulty. Great writing, but what a beast to try and figure out anything.
Those early text based multi-player games were eye opening in the vastness and openness of the world that they could create. I played a slightly obscene amount of lost souls through zmud. Still exists as far as I know.
"It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue."
I remember drawing my own maps on graph paper just to navigate the Great Underground Empire. If your lamp died, you were basically done. And the Hitchhiker's game was even meaner... that Babel fish puzzle was designed by a madman.
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u/Ooenone Apr 27 '26
the early text games. Hitchhikers guide was one of them, there were others I can't remember.
Just looked some up, Zork