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The problem is a mismatch between expectations and reality. SJWs believe without qualifications that men and women are equal. But it's been empirically proven that they're wrong - men and women prefer different types of games. So it's not at all surprising that a culture at a company developing games with a primarily male audience (90% of MOBA players are male) will be skewed towards silly male behavior. Just like I'd expect the culture at a company developing games with a primarily female audience would be skewed towards silly female behavior.

If you ignore the evidence and use the fantasy that the two are equal as your guiding principle, you end up with employment environments which are inferior for producing both types of games (those preferred by men, and those preferred by women). Because you've stripped away part of the development culture which makes the games "click" with their audiences. You gotta be careful to limit your remedies to target actual problems - harassment, demands for sex, withholding promotions based on gender (which to be fair seems to be most of the criticism leveled at Riot). When you start to targeting innocent "male" behaviors like nerf fights in the hall, or the gender ratio of your developers matching the pool of job applicants rather than being 50/50, you've gone too far.

Disclaimer: I have nothing against female gamers or female game developers. One of the most influential video game developers in the genre I preferred when I was growing up (adventure games) was a woman. And I think she was instrumental in breaking home computer games away from the stereotypical shoot-em-up genre popular in arcades. But even she recognized that men and women have different interests.

As an aside, Sherlock Holmes: The Riddle of Crown Jewels is my favorite text adventure game. The humor there is fantastic. Try getting it and shooting Holmes when you get the pistol.

Legend Of Kyrandia is an old but very good adventure game that runs very well in DOSBox. Very easy to control (it only uses mouse & left-click), not too hard, and rather entertaining. Graphics are hand-drawn and, IMO, look pretty nice even today - not too cartoonish, more like a fairy tale book. It's also rather "family friendly", as there's no blood and gore involved (even though it's possible to have the player character die).

As well, there are three games in the series, all looking and playing mostly the same, with connected storylines - so you get a lot of play time out of the whole thing.

An hour of searching revealed these clues to the origin of the classic gaming name Zork. Here's a 2001 interview with Dave Lebling, one of the devs from Zork and the early days of Infocom posted on Adventure Gaming Classic http://www.adventureclassicgaming.com/index.php/site/interviews/171/:

Q: There had been numerous speculations regarding the origin of the word "Zork." For the record, who among the "Infocom Imps" came up with this name? Where is the exact origin of the word "Zork"?

A: I'm pretty sure it was Marc Blank who first applied the word to the game. The word itself was current as an exclamation or nonsense word (like "foo" and "bar") around the lab. Programs in the ITS operating system were had to have six-letter or fewer names, and it was pretty common to use a placeholder name when working on something new. I think Marc used "TS ZORK" as the placeholder, and it stuck.
I think "Frobozz" was similar, of a variant of "foobar." Bruce Daniels was, I think, largely responsible for its ubiquity in the early parts of Zork.

We briefly changed the name of the game to "Dungeon" (which was my bad idea, I sheepishly admit), then changed it back after TSR (the D&D people) threatened us with a lawsuit over it. MIT's lawyers squashed them like bugs but we decided we liked "Zork" better anyway. The widely distributed Fortran version of Zork was written during the period when the game was called Dungeon, which is why that version is often called Dungeon.

Also here's a further clue in "The History of Zork", as recounted by Tim Anderson http://www.csd.uwo.ca/Infocom/Articles/NZT/zorkhist.html:

"...Marc, Bruce, and I sat down to write a real game. We began by drawing some maps, inventing some problems, and arguing a lot about how to make things work. Bruce still had some thoughts of graduating, thus preferring design to implementation, so Marc and I spent the rest of Dave's vacation in the terminal room implementing the first version of Zork. Zork, by the way, was never really named. "Zork" was a nonsense word floating around; it was usually a verb, as in "zork the fweep," and may have been derived from "zorch." ("Zorch" is another nonsense word implying total destruction.) We tended to name our programs with the word "zork" until they were ready to be installed on the system."

Anyone got the email address for Marc Blank? Undoubtedly the absolute truth lies with him.

Scott Murphy had a difficult relationship with both Sierra and Mark Crowe, he seems to hold grudges, and sort of rambles honestly:

http://www.adventureclassicgaming.com/index.php/site/interviews/234/

Finally, Manhunter 2 in the next-gen consoles!

Damn, why did you have to bring that up? I pre-ordered that game. I thought it was going to be a return to great games like Star Trek: 25th Anniversary and the even better Star Trek: Judgment Rites. Perhaps even as good as A Final Unity.

And then Interplay cancelled the game and my pre-order.

Damn, why did you have to bring that up? I pre-ordered that game. I thought it was going to be a return to great games like Star Trek: 25th Anniversary and the even better Star Trek: Judgment Rites. Perhaps even as good as A Final Unity.

And then Interplay cancelled the game and my pre-order.

Damn, why did you have to bring that up? I pre-ordered that game. I thought it was going to be a return to great games like Star Trek: 25th Anniversary and the even better Star Trek: Judgment Rites. Perhaps even as good as A Final Unity.

And then Interplay cancelled the game and my pre-order.

I always found the Oddworld games to be visually stunning.

You can say that again!

I always found the Oddworld games to be visually stunning.

You can say that again!