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This seems as a good a place to start looking as any. It allows you to make text-based games but expand into graphical adventure games. There's a free PDF book on there as well.

That's actually already happened, in a way. After Infocom went out of business the fan community reverse-engineered their VM (the Z-Machine) and Graham Nelson designed a new language and compiler for it (Inform). That, along with other interactive fiction languages/toolkits that compile to their own VMs (TADS, Hugo, AGT, ALAN, and many more) and a small but dedicated community has ensured that interactive fiction hasn't died out.

Every year dozens of new games come out, usually for the two major annual competitions (the IF Comp and the Spring Thing). Most of them are shorter than "commercial-era" games, mainly because they're written by hobbyists who don't have the time and resources to commit to building large games. They run the gamut from puzzle-focused games in the style of Infocom to story-focused games that eschew large numbers of elaborate puzzles to focus on story, and there are also more experimental and artistic games that try to push the medium in new directions. The IF Archive has an extensive collection of these games, and there are several review sites that attempt to catalog and organize the archive. The IF community has long had rec.arts.int-fiction and rec.games.int-fiction at their center, though with the rise of blogs and web forums it has started to fragment some.

Future Boy! (http://www.generalcoffee.com/futureboy) came out last year and was one of the best games I played in a long time. It's a throwback to classic adventure games plus it has animation and great spoken dialogue and is playable on just about everything...Windows, Linux, Mac, Palm. I was surprised that it didn't as much attention as I would have thought.

And they're still making games like those. Really good games, too:

http://www.generalcoffee.com/futureboy

anybody tried out this yet? text games crossed with animated movies crossed with comic books! what will they think of next!

TADS: http://www.tads.org/
Glulx: http://www.eblong.com/zarf/glulx/ (looks like a 32-bit Z-Machine)
Inform: http://www.inform-fiction.org/ (this is the infocom virtual machine)
Hugo: http://www.generalcoffee.com/hugo.html

Also check out the HUGO Interactive Fiction Design System.

There is a version of Zork for it but i can't remember where exactly i found it. I suggest searching around the site.