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As the AC above says:

http://xyzzyawards.org/
http://www.ifarchive.org/

Getting pretty old now, but two wonderful free games you could try are:

- Curses - huge in scale, brilliant in concept and execution
- Christminster - don't be tempted to believe that the opening puzzle is an unsolveable hoax

These come as files for an interpreter, which you download separately. Those links have all the info.

You! Yes YOU! I want you to save the world. No, seriously. Darkness has befallen your brethren, and all of the lands are at war. You're the only one that can change the world for the better. You'll play this amazing game or read an awesome story, the protagonist will accomplish amazing feats and your reward will be: A CREDITS ROLL! HELL YEAH! How many times have you defeated the most bastardly bastard, and that's it?! No more story? You don't get to reap any real reward after all that hard work mashing buttons, or turning hundreds of pages. Yet, that's the norm. It's what's economically advantageous.

True, the cost of high quality game assets is so much more expensive today, but I'm a game developer and story architect, not an accountant at all! In my stories I don't hang the carrot of climax over your head, promising you a brave new world you'll never live to see. Instead, you vanquish the great enemy, and keep right on playing exploring and interacting with the new world that you've actually just changed. Oh sure, it does get boring once everything is all sunshine and dandelions; In a single player game you might actually just throw in the towel then, and that's a fine conclusion.... However, with a multiplayer game there's always someone else stirring up the pot, awakening ancient evils and generally being a thorn in your side or an ever adventuring partner.

I come from a time before graphics, where asset creation was as easy as spilling words onto the screen, where we could actually live out the world of Peter Molyneux's dreams! I played and created highly immersive and open ended of games during the BBS era. My games were so vast and the world lore so rich that players were always trading details of the new areas quests they had discovered where none had ever ventured before. Unlike today's RPGs where you're spoon fed quests and skill trees, when you kill my Dragon it stays dead.... until some Necromechanic player discovers the secret to revive it.

The trick is to Love your game world -- No, really LOVE it, with both hands. Get down into every crevice and detail the scent of the dead Cyber Knight's Skull's Eye Socket, just in case some fool decides to "sniff" at it. To do that you've got to realise something that's lost to today's game designers and story tellers: Pride is the Enemy. You have to NOT say, "Look at all the beautiful and clever crap I made!", and shove every bit of delicious content down each and every player's throat to be sure they don't miss any awesomely detailed texture or architecture. No, instead you have to truly craft the world as best you can knowing full well that much of what is made will never be seen by anyone! That's what gives a true sense of depth and vastness to a world, that's what makes players/readers keep coming back for more. You have to set the stage, fill it with a rich and interesting past and tangled web of subplots galore waiting to unfold, then set aside your desire to tell some amazing single narrative arc and instead turn the players loose to explore and forge a unique story of their own making.

IMO, Neal Stephenson hasn't got what it takes, yet. He's never been there. He doesn't know how shitty his "app" book is in comparison to a living, breathing story that's never the same twice. He's never crafted a dynamic world out of text where NPCs and Players alike roam freely seeking adventure. He's never seen the logs full of players trading gossip, giddy with wonder while others retell epic adventures that no one could have ever pre-imagined in a billion years. I have. The MUD makers of old have. Neil may tell a single story with his great work, but to me that's nothing compared to telling thousands of tales with a single massive work. THIS is where I'd like to see some ebooks go -- Not all ebooks, mind you, but at least a few?! Maybe even a MUD? You could do it without the real time component, even. Now the time is ripe again, it's foolish to be makin

It's not faster or easier, but it is more depthful and a totally valid technology driven mode of expression. It's called interactive fiction: http://ifarchive.org/

Well, there's no movie, but there is a fun piece of interactive fiction based on Pac Man. If you haven't played it, you owe it to yourself to give it a whirl, it's only a few minutes to play. It was part of a mini-competition in which people wrote short IF games based on classic arcade games. There are a few other gems from the competition (Centipede is harrowing, and tough to win, for one. I also got a kick out of "Unlabeled game") but I thought the Pac-Man game was fantastic in how it wove the elements of the game into a story.
  There's a Space Invaders, too, which has a neat little intro story before dropping you into a text-based implementation of the game itself.

Here's a download link.

  You'll need an IF interpreter to play the games. If you don't have one already, I recommend Gargoyle as the best all-around IF player.

Ico

But like someone else, I suggest text adventures too. There's lots of free or shareware ones too.. e.g. http://www.ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archiveXgamesXzcode.html

Okay, people! What about ADVENTURE? Wonderful descriptive text, all puzzles solved by logical means, available on innumerable platforms in several variations. http://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/info/advent.html This is the ancestor of all the textual-adventure-puzzle games like Zork and the Infocom Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. (Now where did I put my orange smoke...)

You can't get more classic than Crowther and Woods' Colossal Cave Adventure
http://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/pc/advent25.zip
It was the first adventure game ever created! (Crowther wrote it for his daughters.)

I've played Mike Goetz' B03 version of CP/M Adventure (really Crowther & Woods's, with a few additions) on every computer I've owned since my Kaypro 10, thanks to emulation software. The original CP/M files cost nothing but download time (at 300 baud on a SmartModem, measured in hours, IIRC), and I've played them unmodified since 1984. On this repurposed Dell Inspiron 1525 running Jaunty Jackalope, I use the excellent YAZE emulator by Andreas Gerlich. Hilariously, this old text adventure runs an order of magnitude or two faster than it ever did running natively on the Kaypro.

http://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/cpm/cpm-advent-b03.zip
http://www.mathematik.uni-ulm.de/users/ag/yaze-ag/

So, on the Scotch parsimony principle of cost benefit, Time Plaid divided by Cost, this one game is worth about 80 grillion pazools. Probably a universal principle; I've just spent January replaying every Star Ocean game ever released in English, and will move on to Blue Sphere (in Japanese on the GBC) shortly. After that, maybe FF12 again, who knows...? (What's a life for?)

I've written a simple text-adventure Wave bot that lets you play zcode games -- including some of the old Infocom classics (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Leather Goddesses of Phobos) along with a few choice picks from http://ifarchive.org./ (More games soon.) Just add bardbot@appspot.com to a wave to play.

Yes, but through a z-machine/infocom interpreter, such as one at the following: http://www.ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archiveXinfocomXinterpreters.html

Ha ha!! There were so many of those, it's impossible to list them all.

The best, and most popular were the Infocom games, where failure to light a torch, lantern, match, etc. would put you in danger of being eaten by a grue (a theme that spanned the whole lineup, regardless of genre).

You can find the Infocom games here:

http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/3398113/Infocom_Universe_Bootleg

Pirated, but it's very hard to get the actual copies of the games these days, and the items that came packaged with the game were essential in completing those games (and also very enjoyable to read).

While the link above may not sit well with you, since it's to a torrent site, the original Zork trilogy has been released as freeware, and you can find them here:

http://www.csd.uwo.ca/Infocom/

Text based interactive fiction was very popular on the old 8bit computers (one reason was that it was easier to port to the multiple different home computers around at that time) and there are too many different ones to be able to identify the game you played. The Infocom games are possibly the cream of the crop in this area.

Also, interactive fiction is still alive and you can get all sorts of great games here:

http://ifarchive.org/

Some of these are better than other ones, so be sure to read the ratings and reviews. A few of them match or exceed the quality present in the old Infocom games.

But this is old news now, Windows has a CLI. I hear it's pretty powerful too. I don't spend enough time on Windows to bother learning it, but I'm glad they have it. If there are any useful ideas there, I'm sure they'll make it into Bash or ZSH or whatever.

Doubtful (that there's anything new in this so-called powershell). At least no one has posted anything so far that can't be done easier in a modern Unix shell.

I'm a little less than impressed with bash, but zsh is like manna from heaven and has been so since I first discovered it in 1990 (and it's gotten better since).

Steven Bourne deserves a lot of credit. A WHOLE lot of credit. He was the person who innovated a user interface as a full-fledged programming language and made it work. Well.

The BSD guys came later and attempted to make a csh with better programming features.
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/unix-faq/shell/csh-whynot/
I will not detail my own personal pain and suffering as an emacs maintainer due to the gross misdesign of .cshrc.

At one time I was receptive towards learning csh, but openly laughed when a coworker who was attempting to show me the "power" of csh typed a very long command substitution line that was not only longer than the original command line, but had an error in it so it had to be retyped any way. (Later on, I still ported a copy of csh & tcsh sources to a System V box, of course with a subset of features (sans BSD-only features), just for the learning experience).

Of any fundamental programming interface design error, csh has probably caused more losses than any other single non-Microsoft program. (The default to printing an error message when an unsuccessful glob is "attempted" is #1).

The CLI shells that have proved successful in the long run (ksh, bash and zsh), have all been based off of Bourne's work. The Bourne Shell, even unextended from its successors is incredibly powerful. Let's see PowerShell programmers do

A BASIC interpreter:
http://www.mtxia.com/fancyIndex/Tools/Scripts/Bourne/basic.html
An Adventure game, suitable as a Unix shell:
http://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/shells/advshell.shar.Z

The emulation scene was starting then: it was a time when people were already fond of their older machines and software and began wondering if current machines would be able to run emulated versions just ok. And they did, at least the more basic stuff: emulators for NES, Commodore 64 and Infocom's z-machine were popping here and there. I was on the internet since the 1994 and saw these developments with great passion. :)

Here are some of those sites still around:
http://www.zophar.net/
http://www.ifarchive.org/
http://www.eidolons-inn.net/

Amazing. 1996 was when commercial web was beginning instead of just personal and community driven "homepages". I also remember first getting in contact with the GNU project when downloading a GCC-powered compiler for Windows in 1996. Would only switch to Linux in 2001, though...

On that note, let me recommend Adam Cadre's Pac-Man, from the rec.arts.interactive.fiction newsgroup's "Arcade" mini-comp. It's a text adventure pac-man, and it is freaking AWESOME. You'll never look at the arcade game the same way again.
  Also good in that bunch are Centipede (it is possible to survive this one, barely), Loderunner (the game's setting is rather nightmarish, it turns out), and "unlabeled game" which is rather a one-note bit, but what a note!

You'll find the games from the "IF Arcade" event in Arcade.zip over on the IF mirror, but you'll need an interpreter for TADS and Z-code (infocom) formats -- I'd recommend Gargoyle, which is multiplatform on both ends. (I.E., it runs on Win, Mac, and Linux, and it supports games written in Z-code, TADS, Alan, and several other text adventure formats.) Its homepage is over here.

The old style parser adventure games grew out of the text adventure tradition, also known as interactive fiction. Many of the great old adventures have been liberated, and people are still writing new ones. You can find enough text adventures to keep you occupied for ages at the if-archive.

I'd also recommend tracking down a copy of The Lost Adventures of Legend. It contains 8 great graphic adventures that lie somewhere in between a text adventure and the "3d animated adventures" from Sierra.

It's kind of an archaic genre, but there are a lot of fun text adventures ("Interactive Fiction") in the public domain. http://www.ifarchive.org/ is a good place to dig them up.

How come nobody has yet mentioned IF Archive? The most innovative, thought provoking and literary games are not on your regular console.

Text adventures come in several flavours, many are typically puzzle-based, while others are just a sequential narrative. These have all the advantages of a novel in terms of profound concepts, possibilities and adult themes. But the active involvement that they require to keep the action going makes them a different experience compared to passive uncovering of the plot: they make you think about the storyline, step by step, and get involved in it in first person.

Also there are an annual competition that regularly provides new material, free to play. Some of these beasts provide the most original and interesting gameplays I've seen in a long while; see Galatea as an example (you can play it online).

Thanks for the insightful comment. Your intelligent remarks restore my confidence in /. I don't know why your post was moderated as funny.

I tried my hand at this by authoring a TADS game and entering it in the annual IF competition. It turned out to be a lot harder than I originally thought.

One problem that I ran into was subject verb agreement between what the gaming system provides and what you provide. Another problem was in the combinatorial explosion of the interactive nature of the media. In non-interactive fiction, you know what has already happened in the story so you can reference those things while writing. In interactive fiction, the user may not have navigated to a particular room so you have to be careful when you need to refer to another place or event. I have blogged on this elsewhere.

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.

So, what you're proposing is some kind of multiplayer interactive fiction?

I can still remember the thrill of finally figuring out how to kill the dragon, or that you could water the plant to make it grow...

That said, I never did "finish" the damn thing. Just one more text adventure I never finished (how DO you get off the Heart Of Gold in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy?). And don't get me started on Zork. Actually, I still play text adventures to this day - some very good stuff can be found on the web - try here.

Looking for info on one game I found this little nugget. YMMV.

http://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/info/classic-game-programmers.list

While tailored to interactive fiction, the "book" The Craft of the Adventure is a good read for many people wanting to design levels even in modern games. Especially section 3, Bill of players rights, I think is valuable even today.

The Craft of the Adventure can be found on the IF-archive. While there, another good read is the authorship-guide.

"You can still get them..."

http://www.ifarchive.org/

There are some that various reviewers have said are as good as the Infocom games. Also, using the Inform programming language ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inform ), you can write games that will play on all Infocom interpreters.

This site is really slow right now, but at a mere 68 KB, this old gem is worth a look.

Have a look:
http://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/unprocessed/ad v_crowther_win.zip

Not my work BTW. Credit goes to the crew on rec.arts.int-fiction.

Crowther's original was a game, and you can play it for yourself. Matthew Russoto tweaked the recovered source code so that it will compile under g77.

http://www.russotto.net/~russotto/ADVENT/ ... and David Kinder published a Windows executable.

http://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/unprocessed/ad v_crowther_win.zip

That file will move eventually... you will probably be able to find it from here:

http://www.wurb.com/if/person/2

There are also photos of the inside of the real Colossal Cave, including photos of what's left of the famous brick building (just a foundation, sadly) the famous rock with a Y2 on it, and even a rusty axe head and an iron rod.

http://brain.lis.uiuc.edu:2323/opencms/export/site s/default/dhq/vol/001/2/000009.html

or

http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/001/2/000 009.html

For those of you who don't want to read through the google groups archive (I recommend you do, but this is slashdot), here are some relevant links:
Original source, ported to g77
The above, compiled as a windows binary

Bad choice of name. The Z-Machine is a type of virtual machine used mostly for running interactive fiction, interactive tutorials, and the like, and has been for the past few decades. Its specifications are freely available and anyone can implement their own:

• Z-Machine specs from the IF archive
• Z-Machine specs from inform-fiction

Versions have been implemented in C, Java, XUL/JavaScript, and even NewtonScript.

It's just an interactive fiction title. There's lots of them, but there hasn't been a successful commercial release in over a decade. There are many free ones available though. Check out the IF Archive to see a pretty large selection of them. There is even free software for making them; check out the Inform language / IF development system for creating new games. Plus, there are annual contests to show off your writing talents. Check out both the IF Comp and the Saugus Ghost Story Contest for a couple of examples.

And of course, there's a whole wiki dedicated to interactive fiction, too.

I suggest you look at even older games. No graphics, no gameplay, but amazing plots.

what's IF?

Not all of them do. But just so you know, IF is not suited to hyperlinks at all - being presented with a blank prompt requires you to actually think about what you have to do, rather than just pointing and grunting.
Believe it or not, some people like games that force them to think. And it's not just old hardened fans - I play a few games and I only discovered IF a year or two ago.

I'm hoping for Zork.

It may also be worth mentioning that maps:
http://infodoc.plover.net/maps/

and solutions:
http://ifarchive.org/if-archive/solutions/infocom/ solutions/

to these games are also available online.

Is highbrow merely a synonym for "pretentious and boring"? I can't find it in me to cry about "pretentious and boring" not being well represented in gaming. Is highbrow something like "acquired taste"? Is highbrow "difficult to understand"?

I rather prefer to play adventure games the classic way, with a keyboard. The "vocabulary" of a point-and-click game is quite limited compared to most games that allow text entry. Hell, even most old Sierra games allowed keyboard input.

I just think it's sad that the author of TFA only seems to know about a (in my eyes) limited subset of the adventure games genre. But then, how many console owners have a keyboard?

There is so much more out there in adventure-land, and it's called interactive fiction (or IF for short). Check http://www.ifarchive.org/ for more info.

Well, in Adventure Game Toolkit, there were a bunch of sample Adventure games, including one called Ghosttown . Well, there is a girl in ghost town, and lets just say pulling the girl lead to a perverted passage that was likely inappropriate for someone in my age group (much like the magazines my Dad hid behind the furnace... ah, the pre-Internet age..)

And I though, "But I just typed 'PULL GIRL', I didn't mean that..." Of course, then I started trying other commands with her...

Anyone who wants adventure games should go look. However they are niche market, but the funniest thing is, there's more adventure games out there than games for the NES.

The only thing is you must get an interpreter for them, and there are many of them but they all work perfectly. The main ones are TADS, ADRIFT, and INFORM (infocom engine) but there's at least 10 major interpreters that have been used.

The only other thing is this is a niche field but it's also a free niche market that people constantly contribute too, and in addition they've changed. Adventure style games are now called "interactive Fiction" or simply IF

Please check http://www.ifarchive.org/ http://www.ifcomp.org/ for two sites. There's MANY more. They might not all be amazing, but they are still there, though less graphical than the quest series from sierra.

P.S. Quest for glory is sorely missed.

I'm also unimpressed. Newer interactive fiction VMs such as Glulx and TADS support multimedia even better.

TADS (the other big interactive fiction language as well as Inform) even has libraries to support C.Y.O.A. games if this is _really_ what you want ( cyoa.zip and cyoa_lib.zip at http://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/programming/ta ds2/examples/ ). But the denizens of rec.arts.int-fiction seem to think such an imposed linear gameplay unnecessarily constrains the player (and his/her fun).

Actually, if you want the backstory to pacman, there's an Interactive Fiction version. (A.k.a. "text adventure" for you guys still in the pre-Infocom era) It's teh awesome! You'll never look at that game the same way again.

You'll want a Z-machine interpreter (Gargoyle is the best right now, but Zoom, Frotz, or whatever will work) and a copy of the games from the int-fic arcade mini-comp: http://ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/mini-comps/a rcade/arcade.zip

The best games are pac-man and centipede, IMO. Driver is pretty creepy, as is Loderunner. The unlabeled one is pretty cool, too.

There are more text adventures out there than you could probably play in a lifetime!
The really nice thing is, the vast majority of them are developed on either of two system - TADS, the Text Adventure Development System or Inform, Infocom's system. Both are free for anyone to develop their own games with, and there are interpreters for these systems (especially Inform) on just about any platform you care to use.

A good central 'hub' to start from is the IF archive with some beginners guides on how to get started, and a massive collection of games to download and play. and googling for 'interactive fiction' will turn up lots more sites.
Have fun :)

Interactive fiction has a rather large following on the 'net. http://www.ifarchive.org/

If reading about this has started you jonesin' for the good ol' days, you can always play interactive fiction.

It's like Zork, except literary. I heartily recommend anything by Adam Cadre, especially Photopia (actually made me cry - it's an amazing piece of art) and Shrapnel.

... including LIT, Palm, RTF, HTML, anything. (IT doesn't have to support DRM tho. I won't be buying any books with DRM.) ...

Don't forget Newton books (as are freely available without DRM on Newton's Library) and Z-Machine works (as are freely available without DRM on the Interactive Fiction Archive). I definitely want at least these two formats in my dream e-book reader. A few other less common ones (like TADS, for example) would also be nice, but I'd personally settle for the ones you list plus PDF, Newton book, and Z-Machine.

There are plenty of text adventures still being made, just not commercially. The engines have gotten pretty sophisticated these days (in the sense that there's a lot less of the 'okay, exactly what grammar does it want me to use to tell it to do this thing I have in mind' as well as having a lot of the small details be taken care of by reasonable default object behaviors).

Check out http://www.ifarchive.org/ for a bunch of games and
http://www.tads.org/ for a particularly good IF engine.

you wind up with 2 inferior things in one. A bulky, annoying phone, and a small-screened pda.

True enough. I've yet to see a smart phone that handles the same sorts of tasks a PDA can handle as well as a PDA. Most of the smart phones I've seen so far are comparable more to organizers more than true PDAs.

It's interesting that you mention using PDAs as book readers. I also found that I use their book reading capabilities a lot. I use them not for just traditional free e-books, though, but also free interactive fiction titles. Interactive fiction is a different sort of thing when you're no longer bound to a desktop to "interact" with it. Exploring twisty little passages that are all alike is perhaps inherently more interesting when you're in a real maze of twisty little passages that are all alike, like the waiting room in some large complex...

Market needs to move away from focusing on 'first person shoot'em ups' and forge new genres or revisit old ones.. aka the graphical text action type.. which I thought kicked ass! Typing out what your character needed to do was part of the fun and frustration.

Text adventure games are still around, they're just hiding under a more pretentious name now, interactive fiction. The languages and interpreters are much better today than they used to be; unfortunately most of the games written today are one-author affairs, so no graphics. I don't find that to be much of a problem (didn't the pre-VGA Sierra graphics suck anyway?), but tastes differ.

It has already been done. Check out infodos.

It treats the web and APIs as just more objects and places, and is a platform for writing and sharing your own code to manipulate those objects and places

It treats the web and APIs as just more objects and places, and is a platform for writing and sharing your own code to manipulate those objects and places