Slashdot Mirror
Lost Infocom Games Discovered
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Archivists at Waxy.org have gotten a copy of the backup of Infocom's shared network drive from 1989 and are piecing together information about games that were never released. In particular, there is the sequel to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy called Milliways: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, and there are two playable prototypes of it. And yes, they have playable downloads available."
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.
What if this signature were clever?
"Archivists?"
Last I checked, Andy was just one guy.
-Bill
SlashSig Karma: Excellent (mostly affected by moderatio
I just want to add a small detail to this. If you are *at all* interested in literate programming, you have to check out Inform 7. To say they've pushed some boundaries is an understatement. It's one of the most innovative things I've seen in years. So even if IF isn't your bag, take a look.
That's source code. Inform 7 has been out for a couple years, and I've been working intimately with it for most of that time, but I'm still impressed.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
Wow. What a blast from the past! Sometimes, good things can result from wrongs (which arguably Baio's publishing of the emails was). The historical value of this stuff is undisputed. However the truly brilliant bits are the responses to the blog itself, especially from those actually involved.
There has never been a Slashdot submission where reading TFA was a greater pleasure.
... can be found here. I never did get through that sulky door. Now I can relive the aggravation all over again.
In many ways the Z-Machine was similar to the JVM - cross platform in the day when there were still 30 platforms. The same day the code ran on the Dec20 it compiled for all of the micros.
I wish I could say it was, but I don't think so. I agree about Trinity; and the remarkable thing about Brian Moriarty was that he could do that, at (if you like) the top end of the genre, while also writing "Wishbringer" which was theoretically for youngsters but managed to be really captivating for adults, too. The opening scene of Trinity, in Kensington Gardens, is still for me one of the most perfectly realised of all IF episodes. (Then he went on to do Loom, genuinely a kids' game, and even that was atmospheric and memorable. A remarkable man, Moriarty.)I too met Meretzsky, although this was at the Game Developers Conference in 2006 (or '05, I can't remember). He was talking to a Valve employee, and I had been drinking. I slurringly interrupted, and thanked him for inspiring me to become a games developer, then gushed about Planetfall and asked if he'd gotten my email to him about Splashdown, my IFComp entry that was a blatent Planetfall ripoff.
I learned three things from this encounter:
1) Don't talk to your idols when you're drunk.
2) People have generally heard enough about things they worked on two decades earlier, and don't want to hear about it anymore.
3) Steve is really, really tall.
I worked at Infocom writing interpreters mostly for the 6502 platforms - Apple II, C-64, Acorn, Atari800. The early games were 128K games. They ran in a virtual machine, with 128K virtual address space; including on the 32K Apple. The disks were 144K per side on an Apple II and I think that was the smallest 5.25 in disk capacity. There were no games above 256K through 1989 at least.
Ah, those were the days, when it was actually possible to make money selling text adventures! I made a few attempts to write games myself back then, in Sinclair Spectrum Basic.
Today's interactive fiction authoring systems are more like general purpose programming languages, but with specialised syntax for creating rooms, objects and so on. There's very little that can't be implemented in them, with a little effort, and none of the frustration of being limited to binary flags and the like. TADS 3 has a lot in common with C++.
Inform 7 is a special case, with its natural language type syntax. I7 source code has to be seen to be believed. For instance: -
That paragraph is valid I7 source, and does exactly what it sounds like it would. Things get a little more convoluted once you start declaring complex logic, but it's all natural language. The jury's still out on whether this is actually a useful way to program, but it's certainly an interesting one, and well worth checking out for sheer novelty value!