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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."
after they published Leather Goddesses of Phobos. It is almost like they lost the will to make games.
what I liked about reading this, was the "archeology" of piecing together the behind the scenes - and comments from some of the actual persons involved - reads like a USENET thread - be sure to put on your flame retardant eyewear ;)
Submitter's name: "I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property"
Summary of summary: Some people got ahold of someone's hard drive and published the contents online.
Yeah.
Now all you have to do is not panic if these pages get slashdotted... just... DON'T... PANIC.
I think this is pretty cool, whether the games are good or not it is always interesting to see the ones that didn't make it to market for one reason or another.
I'll use this in class to point out the importance of good backup strategies. And security: this data should not have left the company.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
With this discovery and restoration of such ancient treasures, it would be nice to think that the interest would spur some sort of reunion and one last game "for memory's sake". Actually, although I rank them second, I'd love to see that with Level 9 as well. It won't happen, although I guess Infocom fans ("Infocommies" according to the New Zork Times) could have a crack at writing an Infocom-like game for their interpreter.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
So, 20 years from now, do you think *your* code for a half-finished project is going to have value to hard disk archaeologists of the future? Would you want them to even boot up your .exe?
"Cartload of pinwheel horseshit" my ass!
First, that sounds like fun.
Second, that sounds an awful lot like a Klein Bottle I once played with. Michael, if you or your former co-workers read this, was that email the seed that ultimately brought forth the genius that was Trinity?
I'm barely a third of the way through TFA and I think I've already learned more about some of my favorite games in the past hour than I have in the past 20 years.
I was in fourth grade when I first played with the Zork triology of text-adventure games on the C-64. An innocent kid and budding geek, I tried feeding novel combinations of nouns and verbs to the primitive parser.
I tried "EAT LAMP"... got back "You can't eat the lamp."
"EAT BREAD"... "That was delicious."... Etc.
I tried "EAT ME". I couldn't comprehend why my dad, who had just bought the game for me and was supervising over my shoulder, started laughing so hard.
Several years later I finally understood why he laughed even harder when the computer responded:
"Auto-cannibalism is not the answer."
You can mod this offtopic, but those 1983 game designers had a real sense of humor and subtly implemented it in 64KB.
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
"Archivists?"
Last I checked, Andy was just one guy.
-Bill
SlashSig Karma: Excellent (mostly affected by moderatio
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.
I miss the baggy with the microscopic star fleet in it as well as the extra fluff. Don't need the glasses however, kept bumping into things. Seemed I was constantly in danger.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Actually, that would appear to be an apt way to describe them. The article talks about there being a crater next to The Heart Of Gold and how the information concerning it (it involves sperm whales so isn't suitable for a family website) was visible in the code but was not reachable within the game. There was also a whole lot of planned material that got scripted out (again, discussed in the article) that never got coded at all but could more-or-less be dropped into place as-is. If the source was available and if the parties concerned agreed to play nicely and allow a community effort to finish the game, I think the master vision could be done.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
That is an absolutely brilliant idea. I've tried a few of the opensource games out and haven't really found anything that made me happy. I don't know if this project would be any better but there is a large following of Adam's work and, with that, a ready made community of (probably) geek-types who'd be willing, e.g. excited and committed, to create a work of art. Maybe someone, someone better than I, should approach them with this idea and see where things go.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
>look
West of House
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.
There is a small mailbox here.
>kill mailbox with hands
I've known strange people, but fighting a small mailbox?
>
IMO, he shouldn't have published the emails, particularly without attempting to contact the authors. That's rude and, as can be seen from the comments on his blog, dredges up hard feelings that would best remain private.
In fact, he probably shouldn't have published the code and game files, either. Those data are not his. He has no right to do with it as he sees fit. Someone "gave" that drive to him, but that may not have been theirs to give. Truthfully, I have less of a problem with that, as no one likely really cares about the games themselves. But, its still an issue.
At any rate, I think he's hiding behind "journalism" to simply publish some juicy talk associated with a formerly popular defunct games publisher.
When I click to download the game, it asks me for money. I paid for it in the 1980s; I'm not going to pay again, especially since the money won't go to the creators!
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.
With a lot of the principals more or less still around the BEST thing to do would be to have a REAL story asking about stuff on the hard drive.
I mean, email is NOT that hard.
Was visiting the parents a few weeks ago, and found the original boxes (and most of the little extras) for H2G2, Spellbringer, Wishmaker (?), and one that only payed on the 128 where you build spells from components, even my introduction Zork II. It was a nice little moment.
meh
... can be found here. I never did get through that sulky door. Now I can relive the aggravation all over again.
Just reading that a sequel to the HHG2G game was found got me choked up a little. Guess that makes me weird.
This sig, aah-ah, is comin' like a ghost-sig...
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.