You are on a sturdy bridge leading northeast to southwest. The river below flows quickly amongst pointy rocks. There is a lamp here.
If the sentences above don’t make sense to you, chances are you’ve never played an adventure text game. For you, computer games are all either about the twitch-and-kill of “Doom” and “Quake” or the austere landscaping of “Myst” and “Riven”. Either that or you’re too busy hiding the fact that you’re playing Solitaire from your boss to dive any deeper. Whatever the reason, you’ve been missing out, pal.
If you recognize these lines and feel strangely nostalgic, you’re in the right place, because I come to praise the long-lamented Infocom, the company that created “Zork”, the game from which the above words hail, along with many other fine text-based game experiences. Despite an ineffectual buyout by Activision more than a decade ago, games developed by Infocom still represent some of the most impressive examples of interactive literature ever created. With their code words and magic spells (“xyzzy” and “plugh”), Infocom games are endlessly enjoyable, even when you’re stuck in a maze of twisty passages, all of them alike.
As Peter Scheyen, who maintains a (www.csd.uwo.ca/Infocom/) site celebrating Infocom games, notes, these products “are more immersive than the richest multimedia games, no question.” Scheyen, a computer programmer for the Interactive Channel, in London, Ontario, receives a slew of e-mail inquiries about game solutions or where to purchase one. Activision has squeezed nearly all the classic Infocom games, including the original “Zork” trilogy, the barbed detective thriller “Deadline” and the uncategorizable “Leather Goddesses of Phobos” and “Nord and Bert Couldn’t Make Head Or Tail of It”, onto a CD-ROM called “Masterpieces”.
“The common thread of these letters is that these games are the most immersive, due to the power of imagination,” Scheyen says. For the same reason radio is better than television and books are better than movies, these games are simply more inventive than their descendants.
As hypertext fiction inches along on what will be a long journey from novelty to literature, thanks to the unsung folks at (www.eastgate.com) Eastgate Systems and theorists such as (http://web.mit.edu/jhmurray/www/)Janet Murray at MIT, the achievements of the Infocom crew will eventually get the widespread recognition they deserve. Indeed, Activision recently comissioned a new text adventure game, “Zork: The Undiscovered Underground”, the first one by an original Infocom author since 1990. Scheyen’s site contains all the hints and clues you might need. If you want to build your own text-based adventures, freeware tools are available on the Net – the most popular being (www.placet.com/int-fiction/ifnw.htm). What are you waiting for?
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Are you an Infocom fan? Do you still play the games? We want to know.
