io9
Before video games were blasting you into 80 billion megapixels with enough raw processing power to send a human to Jupiter and back, they used to exist as mere words on the screen. Much like audiobooks, text adventure games exist halfway between reading and watching a movie. In the heyday of text games, Infocom quickly became a leader, pumping out the best games in the genre (which they called "interactive fiction") from 1979 until 1986, when Activision bought them. We still love them, and you will too. We've made a list of Infocom's best science fiction text adventure games below the fold.
- Starcross, by Dave Lebling: This 1982 game was Infocom's first foray into science fiction, and you played the central character who was a lonely miner in space, searching for black hole. However, you end up encountering a massive alien derelict ship and to explore its depths to unravel the mystery. This was Infocom's third game (behind Zork III and Deadline) to feature "feelies," props that came in the packaging that were meant to enhance the gamplay. It included a logbook for your ship, a partial map of space, and a letter from your company which was supposed to help if you encountered alien life.
- Suspended: A Cryogenic Nightmare by Michael Berlyn: This brilliant game featured the player as the "central mentality," basically a human in cryogenic freeze for 500 years, whose sleeping brain functions as the processing center for the city's support systems. However, an earthquake disrupts everything, and you have to repair the systems via six robots that serve as your sense while you're on ice before the a crew arrives to "disconnect" you. Each robot had a different ability, and most of the game was spent trying to figure out how to get them to help you. Plus, the game came with a creepy cryogenic mask cover that terrified me as a kid.
- Planetfall by Steve Meretzky: In Planetfall the player travels the cosmos as a lowly ensign seventh class in the Stellar Patrol, scrubbing floor and performing menial tasks. However, the ship begins exploding and you flee in an escape pod, eventually landing on an alien planet whose inhabitants have vanished. As you try to figure out what happened to them, you encounter Floyd, a goofy robot who quickly becomes one of the most memorable characters in any game I've ever played, both text and with graphics. Touching and funny, this is my personal favorite.
- The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy by Steve Meretzky and Douglas Adams: This award-winning adaptation of Adams' novel takes the book to new heights as you play Arthur Dent. The plot is similar to the first novel, with the character trying to find the legendary lost planet of Magrathea, and encountering galactic hijinx along the way. This game came with a huge amount of feelies, including a microscopic space fleet, pocket fluff, and "Peril Sensitive Sunglasses" that turn black when you're in danger.
- A Mind Forever Voyaging by Steve Meretzky: Just when you think Meretzky couldn't top himself, he does. I swear the guy probably helped shape my childhood more than most of the teachers I had in elementary school. In this game, you play an artificially intelligent computer called PRISM having just "awoken" from what you thought was a real life as a human being named Perry Sim. Turns out you were living in a simulation all that time. Your programmer sends you into several advanced simulations to check out the feasibility of The Plan for Renewed National Purpose being lobbied for by a senator. Turns out, things aren't so nice in the future if Congresses passes the thing. You visit it at 10 year intervals, and it is a commentary on the future, as well as politics. Truly epic.
- Stationfall by Steve Meretzky: Infocom returned to the world of Planetfall in 1987 with this sequel that reunites the player (now a lowly lieutenant stuck processing paperwork) Floyd. Although not quite as charming as the original, it does have a lot of the comic and touching hallmarks of Meretzky's writing. Fans weren't too pleased with the ending of this one, however, and Meretzky said he did it because he didn't want to write another game in the series. Darn it to hell.
- Leather Goddesses of Phobos by Steve Meretzky: This is an interactive fiction take on Barbarella, and the player can set one of three different "naughtiness" levels: tame, suggestive, or lewd. Think Leisure Suit Larry, but in space and without any graphics. Set in 1936, the player tries to stop the Leather Goddesses of Phobos from invading Earth after they abduct him. If you fail, you'll get tossed into their "pleasure dome." Why would that be considered a punishment?
- Trinity by Brian Moriarty: Trinity is one of the most epic games ever created, and probably the best (although not most-known) that Infocom released. Set against the creation of the atomic bomb, the player finds himself in the middle of a nuclear missile attack in the United Kingdom. Through a series of adventures involving time-travel and space-folding, you have to foil several different nuclear weapons tests in order to have the military abandon the technology. Truly an incredible game with emotional moments, and well worth playing, even today.
You'll either have to do some digging through garage sales, check out eBay, or find various electronic versions of these games scattered across the web. They're out there in different places, and we suggest Googling "Infocom" for starters. You'll need a tiny program to play the games, but we recommend trying to find the packages with the "feelies" for a truly unique experience.
Comments
Planetfall kicked ass, along with every single other text adventure to come out of Infocom. 100% perfect track record.
I picked up Infocom's classic 'The Lurking Horror' recently off eBay - in mint condition and still in it's original shrinkwrap - what a find!
Or you could, you know, play the 1500+ active MUDs (Multi User Dungeon) aka. Online Text Adventure that still exist . Though only a handful are widely known there's one for any theme you could think of: Pern, Sword of Truth, Wheel of Time, (Every anime ever :) ), not to mention all of the original themes.
@ShawnC++: I used to be in Hyperborea.
Thanks for evangelizing, io9! These are the pinnacle of computer gaming for me. So many hours in front of the iiE... I think Zork deserves a mention here, even though it's fantasy rather than science fiction, since it's the Citizen Kane of text adventures. So consider it mentioned.
My friends, text games are still kicking! They're called MUDs and there are hundreds of them out there to suck up your time. Look up GMUD or zMUD for a MUD client that will give you a list of popular MUDs and allow you to make macros and whatnot so you can get wherever you want quickly. I used to MUD hardcore until the one I frequented did a full wipe. They even have ones based off the Star Wars universes (and IMHO they're better)!
I still play through the Infocom games every few years. It's still fun, although it's less fun when you've memorized how to get through the mazes. The "Lost Treasures of Infocom" cd-rom is stil available here and there.
I think I agree about Trinity; it's so cool and evocative and well written. But that one scene with Floyd in Planetfall is the best scene in any text adventure.
Oh man. Planetfall, Leather Goddesses....just the above the jump images.
I had honestly forgotten about both of them, but just seeing "Today's Stellar Patrol"...
I hear sethmad about Zork, but these two just blew me away.
HHGTTG was unfairly difficult. Instead of being like Zork where if you ran into a puzzle that you couldn't figure out, you could wander off to another part of the maze, it was strictly linear -- you had to solve one puzzle to reach the next.
The worst part was that you'd often find that a particular puzzle was unsolvable because you didn't pick up a particular object five levels earlier. For example, when you leave your house at the beginning of the game, there's a large pile of mail sitting next to the door. There is absolutely no reason why you'd think to pick it up. But when you get to the Vogon ship, you need the mail to distract a robot and get the babel fish. There is absolutely no way to escape the Vogons if you didn't pick up the mail.
floyd!!!
@seanohara: I so distinctly remember the same damned problem.
Which is why it did not bring nostalgic tears to my eyes the same way as the others (although they all had some of that.)
I used to love "Starsaga 2: The Clathran Menace". It was basically a computer-supported choose-your-own adventure - or a roleplay session with the PC as the DM. You (and up to 5 other players) picked a character, read the book giving you your intro, and input codes into the game which represented your actions (you got a certain amount of time per turn, and different actions were worth different amounts of time). Then the computer would give you passages to read from books A through N, which gave you the results of your actions and usually gave you further action codes.
The computer tracked what items etc. you got too - you could build things from them, trade them etc. if you knew the right action codes. You really needed a huge notebook to keep track of what was going on.
There was a map, too, to keep track of where in the galaxy you were.
[en.wikipedia.org]
[www.the-underdogs.info]
Let me add my voice to the chorus praising Infocom. Their games were by and large terrific even when they weren't SF-based. The Lurking Horror was a masterpiece, and who can forget their first IF love, Zork?
"There is absolutely no way to escape the Vogons if you didn't pick up the mail."
Yes, but the babel fish puzzle is early in the game, so it's not that hard to restart and get the mail. It's clearly a situation where there's only room for one "object" on the satchel, so you just have to remember that there's an object that counts as more than one thing so the cleaning robot can't grab everything. Anyway, you should be picking up everything you see in a text adventure.
I thought it was much harsher to have to remember to feed the dog (so it wouldn't eat the microscopic space fleet). Sure, you don't HAVE to do that in your time at the pub, because you can do it when you're Ford. But if you get through both times at the pub without feeding the dog, then you REALLY can't win.
Along with MUDs, there are also new text adventures being written with tools such as TADS 3 and Inform 7. Take a look at ones like Emily Short's games (especially Galatea and Savoir-Faire), and the recent game Suveh Nux.
Man, I miss the Zork series.
I can't believe no one has mentioned the xyzzy awards and the continuing evolution of interactive fiction gaming beyond MUDs. Start at the IF archives and go from there!
[www.wurb.com]
My favorite is Metamorphoses, a winner in 2000.
You can also write your own very easily with Inform7, a beautiful development environment.
[www.inform-fiction.org]
While I love MUDs, they don't come close to the experience of well written and well designed IF, which are like living/playing through great novels and bring all the literary theory about being "ludic" and about hypertext fiction to life... And don't get me started about the hypertext fiction academic wankers... IF rooolz!
@seanohara: I third that. I never finished Hitchhiker's; it sits in the garage with the TWO TI 99/4As, with the badass 32k expansion.
Still have the box, just missing the belly button lint...
man i loved infocom games. i finished everyone of them i started, i didn't play them all, but they were awesome. what better graphics processor than your brain? one of my favorites was planetfall, i loved my goofy robot side kick floyd. everytime he would come into a room in the game he would always say "floyd here now!"
now i've got an itch to play some zork(s) again along with the others, gotta search usenet now....
You used to be able to play the Hitchhiker's Guide game here at the BBC website:
[web.archive.org]
...but I believe that they have taken thegame down, though the page still exists. The same link does take you to a retrospective of the game, including an interview with Steve Meretzky however.
I'm playing through the Enchanter series now. I finished the first game, Enchanter, and now going through Sorcerer. The games have been extremely difficult, especially the second one. In Sorcerer I have resorted to drawing a map in a spreadsheet to keep track of location and inventory.
Here's a link to a gallery of the box art and goodies that came with many of Infocom's gray-box titles: [infocom.elsewhere.org]
After a bit of searching on the BBC website, here's the official link so you can play the Hitchhiker's Guide game, complete with flash animations, similar to the ones from the BBC TV series.
[www.bbc.co.uk]
sorry, here's the link....
You can write your own text adventures, using a specialized language called Inform.
(Actually, there are other authoring languages out there, but Inform is my favorite.)
What? Where's Bureaucracy by Douglas Adams? That one drove me nuts, but it was a fun kinda nuts.
I love that the NBC show Chuck is full of Zork references. Maybe Chuck is 10 years too young to even know what Zork is, but so what?
Oh, and did you guys ever play the detective games? I solved Witness pretty easily, but for some reason I could never get through Suspect...
The Online Gamer's Anthology podcast has a couple of episodes looking back on the old text adventure games.
Episode 7 covers several Infocom games. [www.virginworlds.com]
Episode 6 covers Zork. [www.virginworlds.com]
Ahhh, Infocom. I still have the flying saucer package that contained Starcross hanging on the wall above my computer.
Wow... what a trip! I wish I had a poster with all of the above artwork. I'd hang it in my retro game room.
They just don't make games like they used to. You know, when you actually needed a deep story because there weren't any fancy graphics to woe players.
i thought MUD (multi user dungeons) were more akin to mmorpgs than just text adventures... "INTERACTIVE FICTION" seems to be the new banner under which text adventures are still kicking around. HATE that name though. it's a text adventure, not an interactive fiction. it's a comic book, not a graphic novel. ugh. respectability can bite me.
oh man, retrospect is such a double-edged sword... how come the covers for all these old games looked so much better back when I was a kid?
Anyway, much respect for Planetfall as I can hardly remember ever again playing a game that made me feel so strongly about a character (Floyd). The eating and sleeping requirement was also a great addition to the genre as it really created a sense of urgency.
Other obscure games I remember playing:
Queen of Phobos (great vector graphics including some nifty - at the time - animations)
Kabul Spy (yet still so topical)
Time Zone (on 6 freakin' disks!)
The Mask of the Sun (nifty color graphics)
I just love to play "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." I already try to eat something, and the bloody game just chastises me for it.
Since I've recently joined the 20th century (my 1st computer 3 years ago), I completely don't know what you guys are talking about.
However I do remember playing a game on my Dad's computer called "Adventure". One was always lost in the West Hall of the Mountain King...
P.S. This was pre-graphics BTW. There was also some Star Trek related game, but it was you trying to figure out vectors to blast Romulan spaceships to smithereens.
i loved these games far too much and am glad they got a mention here. my parents sold our Infocom games in the early 90s while i was away at college -- i've never forgiven them!
the IF archive is definitely worth a look for those still interested in playing. it's not sci fi, but the game "Curses" is very good, in classic infocom style.
@pkittie: Ah, Adventure. I guess it was the father of Infocom in a way. I've forgotten my history of video gaming but all the text adventure games were an important part of my post-college life. I loved the three Zork games especially although Infidel was fun.
[www.richardlowe.com]
The same site has a bit more about Adventure and lots about Zork.
[www.richardlowe.com]
[www.richardlowe.com]
Have fun looking. Remember to keep the lights on.
The UK had a massive homegrown text adventure scene in the 80's. One of the big ones was Level 9...
[l9memorial.if-legends.org]
...who knocked out some really interesting stuff.
I'd recommend Snowball, an epic (7000 rooms, or so they claimed) science fiction adventure, the Time and Magik fantasy trilogy, the satirical Worm in Paradise (and its two predecessors), and, for something totally different, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, based on the popular 'youf' novel.
Magnetic Scrolls...
[msmemorial.if-legends.org]
...did some great games too, although they committed the sin of having rather nice graphics.
Wow. These are fantastic. Why don't they update these? Oh right- COMPUTERS.
I've still got a copy of Hitchhiker's Guide on two 5 3/4" floppies. It was the first piece of software I ever bought.
@pkittie: Yeah, the Scott Adams games! Adventureland, The Count, Savage Island...
heh, yeah i remember when zork 1 first came out, i was a junior in high school (or 10th grade, can't truly remember) and me and my best friend would get together during homeroom and trade zork notes and map info til we finally finished it and celebrated by having some grue stew.
then throughout the rest of high school (and after), we would do this for each new infocom game released. man i missed the good ole text based days. i remember us also sitting down and talking about lode runner when it was first released on the apple 2, we thought how cool it would be to play the game from a 'head on' view. again this was like 1982, 83 well before the term 'first person shooter' was coined.
man i also miss the days of staying up for days at a time programming 'demos' and 'intros' for the apple 2, c-64 and then the amiga 1000. ah, the good ole days of assembly programming by night and pascal programming classes by day for high school credit...
@seanohara:
> There is absolutely no way to escape the Vogons
> if you didn't pick up the mail.
Thank you! That's what I needed to know. I'm going to install HHGTTG again and retry that. Oh wait, there's no floppy drive here ... gaaaah!!
@Chilly Hollow:
You're the bomb!
@PocketCoil: Get yourself a c-64 emulator (CCS64 is very good) and the HH game itself from HERE.
Does anyone remember a game for Mac, b & w graphics, around 88' to 93' involving someone kidnapping your girlfriend, you come to a house that has a giant spider, a greenhouse, a maze with zombies, a tower with a sphinx? You were also on a time limit (I think poison was involved) and if you spent too much time, a giant skull out of nowhere flashes on your screen and scares the bejeezus out of you.
Ah...I found it...Univited.
Which can be played online (on your Mac) with 1250 other games from 1980 onwards (including some of the previously mentioned games):
[www.virtualapple.org]