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A History of Early Text Adventure Games
HFKap writes "The earliest computer games were pure text and were passed around freely on the ARPANET, culminating in the 'cave crawls' Adventure and Dungeon. The advent of the home computer opened up a commercial market for text adventure games, though the limited resources of these machines presented significant technical problems. Many companies vied for success in this market, but the best-remembered today is Infocom, founded by a group from MIT. Infocom's virtual memory and virtual machine innovations enabled them to design extremely ambitious and creative games, which they dubbed Interactive Fiction (IF). Ultimately the text game lost its paying customers to the lure of graphical games, such as those produced by Sierra On-Line. This article is a dialogue between Harry Kaplan and Jimmy Maher, editor of the modern IF community's pre-eminent e-zine SPAG."
You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Whenever I go to foxnews I am happy to see there are still many, many very creative people releasing this interactive fiction, complete with hyperlinks to make it interactive leading you to even more fiction. I would say if there is one genre that really stood the test of time. It is IF. Horay!
"Oh look! A rainbow!"
"You are at the fountain."
I must be getting old. I remember "flashbulb" memories and genuine excitement about Adventure whenever a huge block of text would scroll into the screen, indicating a new area or a puzzle solved. We used a rotary dial phone into a 300 baud acoustic coupled modem on a dumb terminal in 1977. Ah, fond memories of my first exposure to computers.
Long Live Plugh!!!
This should stand as proof that graphics should not be in the forefront of the entire gaming industry, they had graphics then and did much better giving a fully descriptive story as was needed. I really want to see some level of text based gaming come back. Hell it might be a great way to market a Wii Keyboard.
Anything can be found funny, from a certain point of view.
I was a kid and I had a bare knowledge of English language as 2nd language, so it went like:
...
"You start off with your parachute snagged on a branch of a mangrove tree, leaving you helplessly dangling high above the jungle floor."
> north
> go north
> down
> go down
> climb tree
> look tree
> look at tree
> look parachute
> objects
> inventory
> help
> shit
> untie parachute
Yeah, sorry if I don't share the same enthusiasm for such games.
I am looking forward to this upcoming documentary:
http://www.getlamp.com/
by the guy who did "BBS: The Documentary"
That's the one I remember playing a lot on my C64.. "You wake up. The room is spinning very gently round your head. Or at least it would be if you could see it which you can't." For those interested, you can play it online here: http://www.heavygames.com/hitchhikersguidetothegalaxy/gameframe.asp
"The purpose of learning is growth, and our minds, unlike our bodies, can continue growing as long as we live." - M.J. A
south. east. open window. in. west. get lamp and sword. east. up. light lamp. get all. douse lamp. down. west. move rug. open trapdoor. down. light lamp. north. attack troll with sword. again. again. again. again. get axe.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
If there's an English major in the house: What is it called when an interview consists of one small question, followed by many paragraphs of detailed answer, followed by an unrelated question?
In other words: Is there any sort of descriptive term for "interview by email" which I can learn, so that I can more aptly describe these non-conversations in the future?
They have about as much interaction as an interview might if it were conducted by parcel post. While the monologues contained therein may (or may not be) interesting, the whole thing lacks so much spontaneity and fluidity that I might as well be reading a book.
Kid-proof tablet..
Back in the days, and I don't speak from experience, computers were not for everyone so the market was different. Today, most gamers don't have the patience to read a book, even less to think while doing so like you do in an interactive fiction game. Actually, the whole society is like that. So, shiny graphics ARE important today. I showed some Infocom games to some friends since I thought text adventures were a nice idea and when they saw there was no graphics they simply shrugged them off. Well, one did try Zork, and after a few minutes, he thanked me for showing him something he didn't know and never touched these kind of games after that.
Like Roberta Williams said in 1999:
Back when I got started, which sounds like ancient history, back then the demographics of people who were into computer games, was totally different, in my opinion, than they are today. Back then, computers were more expensive, which made them more exclusive to people who were maybe at a certain income level, or education level. So the people that played computer games 15 years ago were that type of person. They probably didn't watch television as much, and the instant gratification era hadn't quite grown the way it has lately. I think in the last 5 or 6 years, the demographics have really changed, now this is my opinion, because computers are less expensive so more people can afford them. More "average" people now feel they should own one.
I used to belong to that demographic long long ago. But with age I simply lost patience and reading too much from a computer screen is tiring. We were young. Now we are at best middle aged, at worst seniors. Most of us do not want or cannot waste as much time on tiring task. Even if the new demographic of young people was coming in, we a bit older would not want to go through that again and again. The myth that now people only accept instant gratification is just a myth. Many of those I.F. were simply cumbersome and unforgivable but since this is all we had, we accepted it. Most people would not willingly eat stale moldy rotten bread if fresh bread is available. You do it only when there is no fresh bread available and you are starving. Same for the first graphic+novel type of adventure like KQ's. We will not willingly go again in that especially eating the cake right off the start breaking down the game.
Maybe they can revive I.F. as type of ebook. But I doubt it.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
There's a guy, Russel Dalenberg, who deals with the "archeology" of the original Adventure game.
Besides the fact that he had had a great userid ("ged") when he first emailed me for info about a then-unknown version, I always thought he had the ultimately geeky hobby.
As a newbie sysadmin, I feel I'm living in an Infocom adventure for some reason. Here's a write-up of my work day about a week ago.
I'd urge everyone to give Parchment a try :-http://code.google.com/p/parchment/
Parchment is a project dedicated to running IF games in your browser, and it does so wonderfully. You can even SAVE your progress, and it gives you a bookmarkable URL you can use to resume your game at a later date. That page tells you how to get any Zcode game playable on Parchment, and the page below has links to loads of IF games that have already been made available.
I'd recommend giving Curses a go, although maybe not if you are completely new to IF.
http://parchment.toolness.com/
I have no sig yet I must scream.
pretty much all the first person shooting games have this at their core.
The basics of gaming hasn't changed in over 30 years. Shortcuts, Mindless violence and the feeling of victory when you eventually "win" - which lasts all of 20 seconds until it gives way to the hollow feeling of "well, what now?"
You really should have picked a better example for your rant, I'm afraid. Just because somebody can do a speed run of Zork doesn't mean that's how you play. First off, Zork is by no means a violent gorefest. It's a game of exploration and treasure hunting. If you play using this minimal set of moves, you've neither truly played the game nor have you achieved a remotely good score.
The truth is that games have changed considerably in the past 30 years. Sure, there were lousy games back then, just as there are now, but they were an entirely different kind of lousy. Usually they were, in my opinion, of the insanely difficult and un-fun type of lousy. There's a lot less of those these days since insane levels of difficulty cause most gamers to do a 180 right quick.
Elrond, Duke of URL
"This is the most fun I've had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"-Sam&Max
All that discussion and not a single mention of MUDs, MOOs or any online multiuser text based adventures! Does the fact that they're running on a remote server and have multiple users somehow exclude them from being designated as text based IF? I think not. If anything they're far more imaginative and far longer player commitment than most single user adventures running on the local machine.
Here in the UK there were a good number of such games published during the 8-bit micro boom of the early 1980s.
The first game to really start things going was Melbourne House's The Hobbit which, on some platforms, included crude graphics for some of the locations. The parser for this game was quite complex, allowing the player to pass instructions on to other characters. The other characters in the game also had some form of artificial intelligence, granting them the ability to wader around at random and move things around. Consequentially no two games were ever the same.
Another significant developer was Level 9 who created huge games using text compression. These were sold for a huge range of platforms.
Another major development was when Gilsoft developed The Quill, a an adventure game construction kit. This allowed virtually anyone to create a game based around a standard runtime environment. Many games were then released to the market, some so cleverly constructed that major software publishers could pass them on at full price. Later add-ons were created that allowed in-game graphics, basic sound effects and other features. Text compression was eventually added, too.
Very good, very good...
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
Battletoads.
Stop Computers/Cars Analogies on S
There is an excellent tool for writing IF that a friend brought to my attention a while back. It's called Inform 7.
I have tinkered with it a little bit, and it makes writing IF much easier. It takes out most of the programming skills, and focuses on a pseudo-natrual English way of writing the game.
Urban Legions
It's a shame these sort of interactive fictions passed away after the advent of the CD-ROM and Myst.
You should look into some of the newer, highly rated works at IFDB. There is a small but active community still developing these games, and each year sees one or two new gems that rival or surpass the most popular efforts of the Infocom era. The best days of the format may well be ahead of us.