Advice fror people trying to get into text adventures: do not start with infocom games. Start with something like Glowgrass, Violet, The Dreamhold, Plundered Hearts*, or Lost Pig. They'pe friendlier to the player.

I get that the interface is a little fiddly at first, but it is highly conventional. Once you have spent a few minutes learning it, you unlock all other text adventures, of which there are many amazing ones.

I see many suggestions for using LLMs to improve the experience. I have tried that myself[2] and played others' attempts[3], and LLMs' world modeling abilities are currently insufficient for that[4]. They invent details that don't exist, they assume things have effects they don't, etc. They add more frustration than they remove.

Text adventures are often puzzle-paced, meaning they tell their story in drips separated by puzzles. These puzzles can be difficult. Best is to play with a friend -- you might get ideas from each other. If you have no interested friend, don't feel shame over looking at hints, or outright looking the solution up. But do let the puzzle simmer for a day first to make sure you've tried everything you can think of.

[1]: An Infocom game but rather different from the others.

[2]: https://entropicthoughts.com/evaluating-llms-playing-text-ad...

[3]: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=6nn0ihhejq2hrvh2&review=86904

[4]: More systematic paper on arXiv I've lost the link to but will post when I find it.

I would love to see pictures and unboxing of the feelies.

Those were before my time. I played many of these as part of the "Comedy Collection", "Sci Fi Collection" etc re-releases when I was 9-10 or so. Later searching for free "games" for my Palm VIIx, I found a Z machine interpreter and played a few of them on my PDA. Comment from a few days ago pasted below.

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First time (only time?) a game made me cry, Floyd's death. 13-15 or so, Up way too late, hiding under my blanket to muffle the noise from the folding Stowaway keyboard, playing on a glowing green 160x160 LCD display on a Palm VIIx running a Z machine interpreter.

Apparently the author still gets emails now and then to this day about how Floyd’s death affected players. He used to have a personal site but I can’t find it now. A lot of players have written about this moment.

I think the other one I beat was Bureaucracy, by Douglas Adams. Got somewhat deep in Beyond Zork and HHGTTG, but don’t think I completed them.

I remember my father getting excited when he saw those Infocom compilations on Walmart store shelves.

I’ve also considered introducing those to my son. He’s 5 now. Lately having him play Mario RPG, Zelda, and Final Fantasy to practice reading.

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“Perhaps the most amazing thing about the creation of Floyd was how easy it was. The entire code and text for the character, if printed out, would perhaps run to ten pages. What’s amazing is not that I was able to create a computer game character that touched people so deeply, but how infrequently the same thing has been accomplished in the intervening two decades.”

Steve Meretzky

Next weekend is the next Ludum Dare https://ldjam.com game making contest. Perhaps we need more text adventures?

These days you can probably vibe code an engine using SpaCy for commands and some kind of word salad LLM or something to make the output more flowery

LLMs have an obvious application of removing the command limitations. https://github.com/UlfarErl/lampgpt

"FYI, it is now possible to play all of the Infocom games with a phenomenal parser using LampGPT, with just ./lampgpt.py -O gamename."

This is amazing! I remember playing some of these in the 90s. Fond memories.

BTW, this site is likely not set up to handle a HN hug of death of downloads so consider throttling your downloads if you can.

It is Pitch Black

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nigRT2KmCE

No BattleTech? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BattleTech:_The_Crescent_Haw...

IF: yeah I’m a fan and once started to teach myself Inform 6, way back when. My greatest accomplishment was translating a random haiku generator in Inform 6. I sort of lost interest as Inform 7 was coming on the scene.

This is without a doubt the best podcast for all things infocom: https://monsterfeet.com/grue/

Hm. I have to challenge a list that doesn’t include George Alec Effinger’s Circuit’s Edge. I get that it was written after the hayday of Infocom, but it was completely within the spirit and craft.

Very few companies in gaming have Infocom's enduring power. I wonder if it will still be remembered 100 years from now.