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Given the notoriously well-known saying at the time that the Spectrum keyboard felt like typing on dead flesh.

I found this really useful page, look at the Prizes Chosen column. Each has a blurb and score of the top entries that year and if you click on it, you get reviews and links to the files.
http://ifwiki.org/index.php/Pr...
There are just so many entries from these years that I would love to see if there are any recommendations for best of in different categories! Well... googling for best interactive fiction gave me this very interesting page
Interactive Fiction Top 50 of all time (2015 edition)
It is awesome because each entry's page has a Play Online button so you don't even need to install it!

You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully.

If you've played these games, you understand that they can occupy a unique place in the human psyche. I think Infocom got the point across clearly in their ads. The games are free, play on any platform, challenge you to visualize an environnment, improve your vocabulary, encourage reading and demand comprehension, engage problem-solving skills, give children open-ended control over a world, and are just plain fun.

They've formed a foundation for the way I approach problem-solving and exploration in ways I probably can't grasp. Newer games are introducing some interesting concepts, and others show how powerfully prose can evoke strong emotion. All in a few hours.

Zork is somewhat overrated; it's from a time when adventure games were a grab-bag of fantasy cliches and "zany" objects. The past two decades have been spent retconning it into something grander than it actually was.

However, there's some amazing interactive fiction out there; atmospheric, tight writing. Totally immersive story. Brain-wrenching puzzles. It'd be great to read / play these on a Kindle. Some of my favourites:

• Spider and Web by Andrew Plotkin - possibly the most unreliable narrator ever. See how long it takes you to work out what's really happening.
• Varicella by Adam Cadre - renaissance period intrigue.
• Anchorhead by Michael S. Gentry - Lovecraftian horror.
• A Bear's Night Out by David Dyle - adorable kid's story

Other couple I like are A Day for Soft Food (have you ever wanted to roleplay as a cat?) and Trinity (a mix of high fantasy and nuclear history)

People are still making plenty of text games, even more elaborate than the ones from the 80s (thanks to increased memory capacity, better tools, and evolving expectations). And indeed, they're popular with blind players who use screen readers.

I don't know if you are including text-based games, but if you are, google "interactive fiction" and go to some of the links. I couldn't find a good starter link (ifarchive.org and http://www.ifwiki.org/index.php/FAQ are a bit unwieldy for a starter, IMHO), but if you search around you can find info about text adventures and ones that are still being developed (and tools to develop your own that will play on essentially every personal computer ever made).

If you didn't pick up the mail that is casually mentioned in the first few moments of the game, you are essentially screwed once you get on the Vogon ship.

Oh yeah. And you also have to buy the cheese sandwich and feed it to the dog outside for no reason, or you'll be killed many, many hours later, forcing you to restart all the way from the beginning.
  That game rates as "cruel," the highest rating on Andrew Plotkin's Cruelty Scale: http://www.ifwiki.org/index.php/Cruelty_scale

In modern IF, it's considered damn rude to quietly screw the player like that. And guess-the-verb is considered a major flaw. Oh, and if you put a maze in your game, I hate you. Heh.

Hey, while I'm at it, check out Inform 7 at www.inform-fiction.org , too. It's an IF authoring system with an IF-based domain-specific language. I love the rules-definition system -- it's wonderfully powerful.

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.

It can't possibly measure up to the awesomeness that is "Conan Kill Everything."
  This title took second place in the "Stupid Title Competition" on rec.games.int-fiction, and unlike most of the other entrants, the submitter took the time to build a whole stupid game around his stupid title.

  The plot is really obvious from the title. You are Conan. You must kill everything.

In Interactive Fiction, there are a whole lot more bad or mediocre games than good ones. Newbies are likely to find coal before they find diamonds, and guess-the-command can be a big turn-off. The best thing is probably to play the games that get the highest marks first -- winners of prior IF competitions, maybe. Not all IF makes you guess the right command, and some do a great job of figuring out what you mean.

And start here: http://www.ifwiki.org/

It's no shock that the audience is small. Most gamers don't even *like* to read -- at least, not for a game. The mainstream criticizes too much text in games. Take an all-text game, and it's the opposite of what most gamers like.

I think most gamers just aren't well-rounded. Most recently, my gaming includes Partners in Time (DS), Zelda: The Minish Cap (GBA), The Spring Thing 2006 Games (Text IF), and Resident Evil 4 (GC).

---- Mike.

A similar idea is presented by Niel Stephenson in The Diamond Age, or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer. Stephenson uses the term ractive to:

describe a form of elite interactive entertainment, in which a live human performer (a "'ractor") working from a computer-provided script, improvises in real-time with paying customers, over a virtual reality network. This imaginary genre, a cross between improvisational theatre, interactive fiction, and mass-entertainment such as TV