Comments on: Every Known Version of Every Infocom Adventure

Every Known Version of Every Infocom Adventure

not_on_display — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 21:32:00 -0800

Welcome to the complete online Infocom adventures page 0/0 >LOOK Here you can find and play online every known version of every Infocom adventure. What next? >▂

By: neuron

neuron — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 21:33:26 -0800

I am likely to be eaten by a grue.

By: yhbc

yhbc — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 21:33:35 -0800

>eat cheese sandwich

By: threetoed

threetoed — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 21:35:36 -0800

>fail school

By: motty

motty — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 21:36:54 -0800

>go there

By: CountSpatula

CountSpatula — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 21:38:54 -0800

Thank you for introducing wage-slayer. I can't possibly imagine all the work hours that are going to be lost, due to this site.

By: empath

empath — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 21:41:08 -0800

oh fuck, no 'undo' command, that was 20 minutes wasted. I like the new games better.

By: Chocolate Pickle

Chocolate Pickle — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 21:41:29 -0800

"Return to Zork" isn't listed. (Not too surprising; it was a graphic adventure, not text.)

By: Palamedes

Palamedes — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 21:41:34 -0800

>say "btdt" >show t-shirt (CTRL-RESET) ]PR#6

By: inigo2

inigo2 — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 21:41:39 -0800

>eat plate of beans

By: middleclasstool

middleclasstool — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 21:41:44 -0800

Hoo boy.

By: brain_drain

brain_drain — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 21:44:00 -0800

I don't understand the mouse controls. How do I shoot?

By: grouse

grouse — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 21:44:05 -0800

I love the domain name.

By: Mikey-San

Mikey-San — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 21:44:12 -0800

> end well
You can't do that here.

By: jedicus

jedicus — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 21:44:57 -0800

None of the versions of Zork Zero seem to work, but it may be an OS X Java issue.

By: kyrademon

kyrademon — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 21:46:00 -0800

Man, I always hated these.

By: ActingTheGoat

ActingTheGoat — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 21:47:32 -0800

A hollow voice says "Fool."

By: RikiTikiTavi

RikiTikiTavi — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 21:50:21 -0800

Wondering if there are licensing issues. Perhaps he/she has licenses for all these and it's technically legal? It seems suspect.

By: pompomtom

pompomtom — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 21:55:59 -0800

This time I WILL finish HHGTTG...

By: paladin

paladin — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 21:56:29 -0800

Before I play, can I save games & restore them later?

By: Artw

Artw — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 21:58:15 -0800

Oh fuck.

By: brain_drain

brain_drain — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 22:00:37 -0800

Here are the boxes and manuals if you want the full Infocom experience.

By: rokusan

rokusan — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 22:02:25 -0800

Oh man, I don't need this. I have WORK to do. Two memories that non-oldtimers might appreciate: (1) Bureaucracy was written by Douglas Adams, and is required reading/playing for any Adams fan. (2) A Mind Forever Voyaging is really freaking hard.

By: fearthehat

fearthehat — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 22:05:00 -0800

Someone needs to take all these games and put them in a Nintendo DS compilation, with a touchscreen keyboard to enter commands. That would be awesome.

By: DiscourseMarker

DiscourseMarker — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 22:05:26 -0800

DAMN YOU n_o_d!!! I was about to close the laptop and go to bed. Just thought "hmm, I'll just swing by Metafilter quickly before I go..." And then I see this. It is going to take every. single. ounce. of my willpower to not spend all night trying to remember how to play games I haven't played in 20 years! I have classes to teach tomorrow. Have you no sense of decency, sir?? seriously, though, this is totally awesome

By: Burhanistan

Burhanistan — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 22:07:01 -0800

As a rotten, amoral elementary and junior high pirate who copied tons and tons of software, I always got a kick out of Infocom's de facto copyright protection. If you didn't have some detail from that neat map or matchbook or whatever then you couldn't move the story along. I would spend my allowance on any new Infocom title when it came out just to see what stuff they packed in the box, even if I wasn't planning to get too deep into that game. It's really quite a feat that they packed so much immersive gameplay into a 128KB floppy. Stuff the Invisiclues, by the way. They're for chicken hearted babies. Anyway, bookmarked for a time when I can sit down and slog through Trinity, the first one I ever tried.

By: clorox

clorox — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 22:09:52 -0800

Shogun doesn't work. Too bad -- maybe I'll never get around to finishing that game. I never got past the scene in the Bath House. (Yes, I had the VGA version)

By: Burhanistan

Burhanistan — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 22:10:21 -0800

(2) A Mind Forever Voyaging is really freaking hard. And a totally awesome consciousness shifting experience for my puny 5th grade brain. You're living in a simulation!

By: crossoverman

crossoverman — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 22:26:07 -0800

> eat plate of beans Cannot understand "eat plate of beans" > overthink a plate of beans You overthink a plate of beans. And find one gold pieces.

By: Palquito

Palquito — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 22:31:25 -0800

(2) A Mind Forever Voyaging is really freaking hard. And a totally awesome consciousness shifting experience for my puny 5th grade brain. You're living in a simulation! Yep. Mind was a spiritual forebear to the Matrix movies and similar cyberpunk scifi (though Neuromancer came out the year before). The only difference was that you were a computer program yourself. I remember how flipped out I was when I went 40 years into the future in the simulation and discovered how horrible and violent the world had become. Really top-flight game. A shame that it's so relatively obscure. Still wasn't as hard a game as Spellbreaker. Jesus.

By: Artw

Artw — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 22:35:36 -0800

"Return to Zork" isn't listed. (Not too surprising; it was a graphic adventure, not text.) Circuits Edge is missing as well, probably for the same reason.

By: flatluigi

flatluigi — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 22:35:59 -0800

What if you want more than every Infocom adventure? What if you want a database of nearly every piece of interactive fiction ever made? You're in luck.

By: Artw

Artw — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 22:39:44 -0800

Java is, btw, pulling a java and refusing to work for me, so I'm safe... for now.

By: fiercekitten

fiercekitten — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 22:40:42 -0800

How come none of these have been rebooted/remade/butchered? I think Planetfall would make an awesome RPG. And I'm sure Leather Goddesses of Phobos would have an immediate... well, fanbase isn't really the right word.

By: Artw

Artw — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 22:45:45 -0800

Planetshock!

By: Sphinx

Sphinx — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 23:53:33 -0800

My boss is gonna be really pissed off at you.

By: ryoshu

ryoshu — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 23:59:26 -0800

> Did you write the z machine in JavaScript? ...

By: JHarris

JHarris — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 00:31:59 -0800

A particular favorite Infocom adventure of mine is Starcross, which I had to figure out all by myself in the days before FAQs. What an imaginative game.

By: Sutekh

Sutekh — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 00:58:47 -0800

> Did you write the z machine in JavaScript? You can't z machine in JavaScript here.

By: porn in the woods

porn in the woods — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 02:22:58 -0800

(fires up C64, notches 5 1/4" floppy disk to put Deadline on the flip side of Planetfall)

By: Jofus

Jofus — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 02:26:18 -0800

Oh my giddy aunt.

By: benzo8

benzo8 — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 02:43:08 -0800

I used to run an Adventure Helpline for a major UK computer games magazine in the early-mid-80s. It was a completely ramshackle organisation; I was maybe thirteen years old, and was paid by the magazine in ex-review games (which meant I got games before they hit the shelves) and it was run on my parents' telephone line at home, the number of which was published monthly in the magazine... At the time I had an encyclopaedic knowledge of pretty much every adventure game on the market; and crib sheets that I'd got publishers to send me for games I hadn't yet beaten myself. I had regular phone conversations with developers and other journalists. And no-one had a clue I was so young. I remember clearly a multi-hour discussion with George Stone, Rocky Morton & Annabel Jankel (who went on to direct D.O.A. (1988) and later, um, Super Mario Brothers) and trying to dodge suggestions that we all met up IRL, cracked open some whiskey and brainstormed some new ideas! It was a time of living on the edge... Of course, it all rapidly spiraled out of control... Gaming exploded and the calls to my parents' phone were constant, day and night, with confused and confuddled adventurers ringing whenever they were stuck, and not waiting for office hours! And it never stopped - I'd put the phone down and it would ring again before I'd removed my hand. There was no multi-line system, no queuing, no call-waiting - just tens, and then hundreds, and in the end thousands of frustrated adventurers redialing time after time to hope that they would once hear the ringing tone and not those hated engaged beeps... The whole thing, of course, became a nightmare of no sleep for me and my parents. That gave me plenty of time to try to keep up with the ever-increasing numbers of new games being released into an exploding market, but my health and my schoolwork, and my parents' health and their patience were all suffering. In the end, it had to stop... It was a glorious eighteen months of my life; it supplied everything a young teen boy growing up in the 80s thought he needed: I got all the new games before anyone else, knew all the developers, all the journalists, and if knowing how to help all my stuck schoolmates didn't earn me kudos, having the latest Level 9 game or Infocom adventure before anyone else definitely did... Even the girls dug it; while none of them played games at the time, they knew there was something different about me, even though they had no idea what. And this was before gaming and computers were nerdy and geek. Ah, adventure games; you gave me joy, credibility, (indirectly saved me) tons of cash, and taught me never to publish my phone number in a monthly newsstand magazine. I salute you all!

By: not_on_display

not_on_display — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 03:53:40 -0800

oh fuck, no 'undo' command, that was 20 minutes wasted. I like the new games better. posted by empath Before I play, can I save games & restore them later? posted by paladin I have successfully used the SAVE and RESTORE commands on "Bureaucracy" -- can't vouch for all of the games. You can keep the window open and play the games offline; the game is loaded in full onto the java platform thingie. I'm guessing save/restore wouldn't revive your game if you quit out of the window.

By: Malor

Malor — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 04:24:05 -0800

Anyway, bookmarked for a time when I can sit down and slog through Trinity, the first one I ever tried. Trinity, BTW, is brutally difficult, probably the hardest of any Infocom game except for Sorcerer. (Sorcerer's time-travel puzzles were brain-destroying.) Trinity was probably my favorite of the early text adventure games, but it's extremely unforgiving. An early mistake can doom your game, and you don't necessarily know it, or even know why you can't progress past a much later puzzle. I tried playing it again last year sometime, and didn't get that far with it. It's an amazing experience if you're wiling to invest the copious amounts of time to figure it out, but even having completed it in my youth, and knowing roughly what to do, I found it too much of a pain to retrace my steps. The game is just too hostile to be very much fun anymore. It's a fascinating and intricate story, but you have to be something of a masochist to explore it. Walkthroughs really wreck Infocom games... honestly, it's the weeks of frustration that made them great. That sense of breakthrough, as you finally got a particular puzzle, was amazing, and why the games were addictive, I think. If you solve every puzzle yourself, you EARN the game, and you'll remember it for a long time. If you use a walkthrough, the impact is so much weaker that you'll find the games quite forgettable. This isn't true at all of later adventure games: ones like The Longest Journey or Grim Fandango are a ton of fun even with a walkthrough. But those early, limited games require that you actually solve the puzzles to extract full enjoyment.

By: majick

majick — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 05:01:20 -0800

I ripped all the z files and stuck them into a single archive -- sorry about the crappy hosting -- so that you can play them locally using your favorite zcode interpreter and not worry about the horrible, horrible, terrible Java interface. From the "Interpreters" section of the Inform 7 site --

Popular choices include: Zoom for Mac OS X, maintained by Andrew Hunter. Zoom for Unix or Linux, maintained by Andrew Hunter. Spatterlight for Mac OS X, maintained by Tor Andersson. Windows Frotz, maintained by David Kinder. Windows Glulxe or Git, maintained by David Kinder. Gargoyle for Windows, maintained by Ben Cressey. iPhone Frotz, maintained by Craig Smith; a free app at the iTunes Music Store, for use with the iPhone and iPod Touch. (This comes with a nice collection of Z-machine story files already built in, but - being basically Frotz - won't play Glulx titles.)

By: majick

majick — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 05:09:57 -0800

Actually, dammit, I'm incompetent. That archive is bloated up with multiple copies of the same stupid Java jarfile. The new one has them removed and is half the size. Sorry.

By: tommasz

tommasz — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 05:14:46 -0800

This time I WILL finish HHGTTG... Finish it? I'm still hoping to get the stupid Babelfish in my ear.

By: dejah420

dejah420 — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 05:20:13 -0800

Oh...jeez...cause I didn't need to be productive for the next few days. Thanks!

By: escabeche

escabeche — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 05:27:13 -0800

A Mind Forever Voyaging is really freaking hard. Wait, is there actually a way to get past the beginning of this game? I eventually decided this was just a cruel prank Infocom was playing on me.

By: samsara

samsara — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 05:41:29 -0800

You are likely to be eaten by a grue If this predicament seems particularly cruel.. Consider whose fault it could be.. Not a torch or a match in your inventory....

By: samsara

samsara — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 05:49:26 -0800

Also, previously this month jscott posted a pretty cool collection of Infocom's advertising materials from the early 80's

By: fings

fings — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 05:53:41 -0800

Leather Goddesses of Phobos would have an immediate... well, fanbase isn't really the right word. Fapbase?

By: flatluigi

flatluigi — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 06:26:35 -0800

escabeche: "A Mind Forever Voyaging is really freaking hard. Wait, is there actually a way to get past the beginning of this game? I eventually decided this was just a cruel prank Infocom was playing on me." Yes, it's beatable.

By: reptile

reptile — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 06:34:57 -0800

I don't think this can be legal. Zork's still under copyright until 2075 if I did my math right. The other games, even later. That said I have a fond place in my heart for the old Infocom games, and they still stand up strong today.

By: rhythim

rhythim — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 06:48:44 -0800

Circuits Edge is missing as well, probably for the same reason. Something told me I'd need to chip in some moddies and daddies today...

By: rlk

rlk — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 06:55:04 -0800

No, you won't finish Hitchhiker's Guide. Not without help. If you want to actually progress and finish one of these, try Wishbringer.

By: Kimothy

Kimothy — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 06:58:36 -0800

Great, now I'm not going to learn how to switch from icons to detailed view in my painfully easy (yet required) computer information class... Thanks?

By: alexwoods

alexwoods — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 07:17:30 -0800

> pound the whiskey

By: not_that_epiphanius

not_that_epiphanius — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 07:47:51 -0800

I ripped all the z files Thanks, Majick.

By: evanlr39

evanlr39 — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 07:56:10 -0800

I remember working on Hitchhiker with a copy of the book next to me. It still took weeks. These games always made me wonder if I was dumb. But I think the truth is the people who really enjoy these games enjoy suffering.

By: jcruelty

jcruelty — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 08:04:40 -0800

Weird, I always thought one of the reasons I liked Mind Forever Voyaging so much was that it wasn't hard. At least, there were no stupid 'put the fish on top of the chest then push the chest over the heating vent' type puzzles. Instead, it was just this beautifully realized & even emotionally powerful short story that you played... I guess there's a bit of puzzle solving but a lot of it is just exploration and observation. I really like that game.

By: winna

winna — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 08:08:11 -0800

Bureaucracy is so hard I almost recommend you don't play it, just because of its mind-numbing frustrating qualities. For me it was far worse than AMFV. Read someone else playing it, instead.

By: MCMikeNamara

MCMikeNamara — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 09:27:48 -0800

Oh my god, Borderzone was the first game I ever bought with my own money, and though I've seen versions of Zork and such online before, never BZ (as all the cool kids call it these days) Thanks for this.

By: Burhanistan

Burhanistan — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 09:31:31 -0800

Borderzone was a late addition with the added frustration of actually being timed.

By: Mr. Bad Example

Mr. Bad Example — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 10:14:45 -0800

> GET YE FLASK

By: East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94

East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 10:22:49 -0800

Interactive Fiction Competition 1995-2008, including all the entries

By: East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94

East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 10:24:24 -0800

Here is a nice IF client for Windows and Linux

By: winna

winna — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 10:33:53 -0800

And if you like IF, Emily Short's fantastic blog is a great read.

By: empath

empath — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 10:42:31 -0800

GET YE FLASK So, i used to think (until very recently), that people actually used to say 'Ye' instead of "the". But where that really originates is that the word "the" was originally spelled with a rune called 'thorn'-- 'þe'. When print was invented, the typesets didn't have scandinavian runes, so they substituted the letter 'y'. Eventually, they just replaced 'þ' with 'th' in all English words. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter)

By: Burhanistan

Burhanistan — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 10:52:15 -0800

Get your filthy Strongbad out of my Infocom.

By: shmegegge

shmegegge — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 11:30:47 -0800

>lose job_ You now have no job. >get job_ You get the job. >inventory_ You check your pockets. You have: job no job >_

By: Malor

Malor — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 11:40:28 -0800

I just noticed that if you turn off Javascript on that page, clicking on a link sends you the raw ZCode file. You don't just have to play them online.

By: Justinian

Justinian — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 12:08:52 -0800

Trinity, BTW, is brutally difficult, probably the hardest of any Infocom game except for Sorcerer. I don't think I can agree. TRINITY is a very good game but I'd put it at only moderately above average difficulty. SPELLBREAKER is massively more difficult, for example. TRINITY is awesome but I have a problem with one of the puzzles. It requires out-of-character knowledge which is something you shouldn't need in a non-comedic game. I don't want to ruin it for those who haven't played, but if you have played it is the puzzle with the soap bubbles. Games should be beatable the first time through if you play absolutely perfectly. TRINITY is not: death is absolutely assured at one point and only by restoring back and using the knowledge you gained through that death can you proceed. (2) A Mind Forever Voyaging is really freaking hard. Uh. There aren't even any puzzles in AMFV until the very end. It's a brilliant game, executed beautifully. One of the pinnacles of computer gaming. I can't say enough for it. It really says something when I can describe the game, in detail, after having played it in 1986 (twenty three years ago!) at age ELEVEN. For example, your human name in AMFV is Perry Simm. Which is morphed to P.R.I.S.M. once you realize you are a computer. The game starts with a quotation from, I believe, Poe's THE RAVEN. "Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before." Yeah, that's deep for an 11-12 year old.

By: Justinian

Justinian — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 12:09:37 -0800

In retrospect, I guess I agree that Trinity was a difficult game, but I still don't think it was among the very most difficult like SORCERER and SPELLBREAKER.

By: egypturnash

egypturnash — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 12:28:38 -0800

fiercekitten: How come none of these have been rebooted/remade/butchered? I think Planetfall would make an awesome RPG. About ten years ago, a friend of mine went to work at Activision. His first project was doing tool-building for their revamp of Planetfall. I never saw any of it, though I saw stuff he was working on after it got canned. I think it was gonna be all 3D.

By: vorfeed

vorfeed — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 12:45:50 -0800

TRINITY is not: death is absolutely assured at one point and only by restoring back and using the knowledge you gained through that death can you proceed. Personally, I think this is perfectly in keeping with the point of the game. Yes, "death is absolutely assured" in Trinity... and that's no accident, nor is it laziness or laxity on the part of the writers. I thought it was a pretty neat point. Out of all these games, I always liked Planetfall and Stationfall best. The message you get in Stationfall if you actually manage to kill Oliver is laugh-out-loud brilliant... the ending of that game is amazingly emotional, too.

By: Justinian

Justinian — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 13:04:38 -0800

Yes, "death is absolutely assured" in Trinity... and that's no accident, nor is it laziness or laxity on the part of the writers. I thought it was a pretty neat point. I dunno, I am rather a lot less certain that this particular puzzle was making any such point. My guess is that they thought the soap bubble thing would be cool (which it was) and designed the puzzle around it without much consideration to the fact that you had to die and restore back in order to get the knowledge to use them properly.

By: Justinian

Justinian — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 13:06:12 -0800

Oh, I have a soft spot for BEYOND ZORK. No, it's not a breakthrough in storytelling or anything the way many of their other, more cerebral, games were. But for what it was it was done quite well. The on-screen mapping, etc, was very cool.

By: subbes

subbes — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 14:29:56 -0800

If you're interested in IF on the iPhone, check out Frotz on the App Store.

By: subbes

subbes — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 14:30:36 -0800

(Frotz has a built-in FTP server so you can transfer those Z-machine files to your iPhone.)

By: Locobot

Locobot — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 14:33:26 -0800

Oh thanks for COMPLETELY SPOILING that game for me Justinian. Seriously your post needs tags or a warning...

By: Sparx

Sparx — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 14:36:45 -0800

koffInfocomUniverseBootlegTorrent/koff

By: Justinian

Justinian — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 15:43:55 -0800

Oh thanks for COMPLETELY SPOILING that game for me Justinian. Seriously your post needs tags or a warning... Rosebud was a ghost all along!

By: Izner Myletze

Izner Myletze — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 15:56:43 -0800

Games should be beatable the first time through if you play absolutely perfectly. TRINITY is not: death is absolutely assured at one point and only by restoring back and using the knowledge you gained through that death can you proceed. I've never understood why assured death is so passé in IF. In order to beat adventure games like Nethack or Linley's Dungeon Crawl, you'll inevitably die hundreds of times, slowly learning knowledge through painful experience. It doesn't stop them from being fun. (Maybe this is why I got so little love)

By: Locative

Locative — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 21:30:57 -0800

No love for Moonmist? I usually played as a character I named Sir Peter Paullenmary, and did inappropriate things like kiss the male characters, who would only "smile warmly." Like my other attempts to stir things up (random cursing, ill-timed touching), not much happened. I never solved the game, either. The furthest I remember getting is into a secret passage where a ghost came and killed me. At least I can vicariously win the game with these walk-throughs.

By: Justinian

Justinian — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 21:35:14 -0800

I think it's a different type of game, Izner. I view IF as, well, interactive fiction. I doubt I'd care very much for a book in which the protagonist walks through a doorway, dies, the author writes "THEN THE UNIVERSE REWINDS FIVE MINUTES", and we see the protagonist pause before the doorway and say "Hey, I've never been through this doorway but for some reason I know that I'm going to die if I enter, so I better go find some protection first". Oh, it might work in a few works of meta-fiction. But even there it often ends up terrible. Have you seen the American version of FUNNY GAMES? Yeah, no good. And TRINITY isn't that kind of story anyway. It's certainly making a point about the world, but not in the sense we mean when we talk about meta-fiction. But what happens in TRINITY is no different that what I describe: a character in a story knowing what is behind a door without ever having seen what is on the other side, with no explanation. It's bad fiction. (TRINITY is still a fabulous game. One tiny set piece does not change that.)

By: grouse

grouse — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 21:53:39 -0800

Locative, I hated Moonmist. I think it was one of only two games marketed as "Introductory" level, yet like you, I didn't find it that easy to solve. I just remember it annoying me for some reason; it didn't have the magical little touches that make me remember so many of the other Infocom games with fondness.

By: Mr. Bad Example

Mr. Bad Example — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 02:41:21 -0800

No love for The Lurking Horror? It was the only text adventure to successfully creep me out (while simultaneously frustrating the hell out of me).

By: Western Infidels

Western Infidels — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 17:24:49 -0800

I'm glad to see that others thought Spellbreaker was hard. I'm pretty sure that either Sorcerer or Spellbreaker was the last text adventure I ever seriously got into. And by "got into" I mean "beat my brains against, futilely." Later I learned I had utterly failed to grasp the mechanics of a magical maze, and there was little hope I ever could have won. At the time, I thought maybe it was just me.

By: davejay

davejay — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 11:32:54 -0800

Perfect timing; my kids are almost old enough to start doing these with us as a family. grew up with hand-drawn maps on taped-together pieces of paper stuck to the walls of the living room, first computer interaction ever was getting my turn to type 'N' or 'W'

By: davejay

davejay — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 11:34:36 -0800

oh, and I never made it through Trinity. Trinity was the reason I stopped playing those games. I got sick of materializing in the middle of the sky and falling...falling...

By: Joey Michaels

Joey Michaels — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 23:24:34 -0800

One of my proudest moments was solving the tea/no tea conundrum. That's all I'll say.

By: shmegegge

shmegegge — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 08:55:37 -0800

seriously, it's a sign of how hard that game was that only 4 people got this joke.

By: grouse

grouse — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 09:12:01 -0800

Is it possible to get a joke and not favorite it?

By: shmegegge

shmegegge — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 09:35:02 -0800

fuck no.

By: Artw

Artw — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 10:40:44 -0800

No love for The Lurking Horror? It was the only text adventure to successfully creep me out (while simultaneously frustrating the hell out of me). I got stalled on, um, operating a microwave oven, but I'm really kind of digging it. Nthing the recommendation of Frotz BTW.

By: Artw

Artw — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 23:39:17 -0800

Hmm. Looks like the latest version of Frotz may take away the FTP feature.

By: haltingproblemsolved

haltingproblemsolved — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 06:09:52 -0800

The site is down now. That was fun while it lasted.

By: not_on_display

not_on_display — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 11:52:09 -0800

Even though the linked site is down, you can still visit the sites posted by majick upthread in order to reconstruct the experience. Happy adventuring!

By: flatluigi

flatluigi — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 12:27:30 -0800

You can also head over to the Interactive Fiction Database (linked above).

By: haltingproblemsolved

haltingproblemsolved — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 14:56:46 -0800

Huzzah!