Friday, September 17, 2010

Text Adventure Game Nostalgia

I've never seen a computer game that came close to the Infocom adventure games of the 1980's (played by typing instructions into a bleak scrolling window of text). Perhaps I feel this way because these are the games I played when I was young. Or perhaps it's true. You decide...by playing Zork, or, even wittier, but requiring slight familiarity with the original book, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Here are other versions of those games, plus a bunch of others, all playable online.

You can also play these games on your iPhone/iPad/iTouch, via a free app called Frotz (link opens iTunes).

The grandaddy of the genre was the original
"Adventure" (aka Colossal Cave), now available as a 64-bit(!) application for Mac OS.

If you're not sure what to do, simply type something and hit a return ("help", without the quotation marks, is a good way to start).

Warning: this stuff is really, really, seriously old school...

4 comments:

Jeremy, Text Game Ninja said...

I love the original Zork text adventure games for the same reason. Probably because I played them when I was a kid, on the first computer I had. Playing them now would probably ruin my childhood memories.

Jim Leff said...

No, it actually holds up well!

Unknown said...

I still have my copy of the Leather Goddesses of Phobos. I remember that it wasn't easy.

James Leff said...

Would you expect the Leather Goddesses of Phobos to be "easy"??

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