Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/09/28/obsessively-complete-infocom-catalog.html
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Take inventory
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These were wonderful games. Unfortunately, a lot of them aren’t playable any more without some version of the physical “copy protection” devices.
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Also notable: the Infocom Gallery in the online Museum of Computer Adventure Game History (it’s on Floor 2, and contains photos of games, disks and feelies, and PDFs of most manuals etc.).
Of course they also have info on a shit ton of other adventure games, around 4000 in total. Highly recommended.
For some games you’ll find patched versions that bypass copy protection the “complete” archive.
Also you will find scans of many of those “copy protection devices” in the museum, in the Infocom Gallery and at the Infocom Documentation Project (which also has the hint files in machine readable form).
That and an interpreter should get you going with most games.
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You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike…
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I still have some of the original versions of their games. And even some copies of the newsletter they put out, called The New Zork Times until a certain newspaper threatened to sue, and they changed it to The Status Line.
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Bureaucracy is an absolute masterpiece. Douglas Adams was involved in every aspect of the game, and as such it is a frustrating delight to play. See if you can get a PDF of all the game materials that came with the box: Triplicate forms for your Beezer Card application, where each layer of the triplicate form had different text than the top one, a copy of Popular Paranoia magazine, etc. It was great.
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I’ve been wanting to play A Mind Forever Voyaging since I first read about it a decade ago. You are an AI living in a computer simulation of a nationalist government projected 10, 20, and 30 years into the future, each decade noting the increasing and steady descent into fascism.
Seems somehow important.
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Don’t miss the Eaten By a Grue podcast if you’re into this.
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That’s from “Adventure” (Colossal Cave) though. The first text adventure, and one that predates Infocom.
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The guy who created AMFV said in an interview he did it trying to provoke controversy, and it came and went without a blip on that front. So he shifted from politics to sex with The Leather Goddesses of Phobos. That did the trick, evidently.
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I have all of these on my Apple ][gs. I have not played them all but collected them back in the day.
Thanks for that. I did not know it existed.
Zork is really built on “Dungeon” rather than “Adventure”. I spent quite a number of hours playing Dungeon on the Physics department’s VAX-11/750 in the the late 70’s and still clearly remember “This room was constructed over very weak rock strata” some 40+ years later…
And the sense of victory when I finally did in the thief and could navigate that maze in peace.
I was delighted to find it had been turned into a personal computer game many years later.
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Dungeon actually is Zork. The mainframe version of the game was originally called Zork and then renamed to Dungeon. And then several of the mainframe Zork team founded Infocom and split the game into pieces in order to fit the small memories of the personal computers at the time. That being said, Zork/Dungeon was written after Adventure and shows influence from it (like how the game is mostly underground but there’s a house above ground with gear that you need)
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I had Planetfall and Stationfall on my Palm IIIx. (not legitimately, but someone had a rather nice Z-machine player for PalmOS). It was nice to play when I was waiting at the dentist or whatever.
Does anyone have a recommendation on a z-machine for Android (or iOS). I like one with a nice friendly interface that lets you tap on words instead of having to type everything.
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I’ve been wanting to play A Mind Forever Voyaging since I first read about it a decade ago. You are an AI living in a computer simulation of a nationalist government projected 10, 20, and 30 years into the future, each decade noting the increasing and steady descent into fascism.
It was an AMAZING game. Really changed my perspective as a young adult. I came here lamenting I didn’t see AMFV in the downloads, but it was in the image preview!! Still have my copy in storage.
So happy to see someone else bring it up. And thanks for the link @L0ki!, can’t wait to try it again.
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Given that the games are still under full “All Rights Reserved” style copyright, I’m waiting to see when Activision pulls out their takedown hammer and begins swinging it around.
(Activision bought out Infocom in 1986.)
They haven’t gone after the Internet Archive yet…
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