August 25, 2004

Interactive Fiction. Some excellent recent examples of the genre include Shrapnel and Spider and Web, and you can find many of the classics from the 80's here and here. And there's plenty of tools around if you want to make your own.

Interactive Fiction was mentioned in this thread, too. via World Of Stuart.

posted by dng 20 years ago
  • Ah, I love this kind of stuff. I used to play these on the old Speccy. I also had a go at writing an adventure (as they were then called) of my own once but I had no idea what I was doing at the time and ran out of memory pretty quickly. I tried TADS a few years ago too, but ran out of patience on that one! This was my problem, not TADS' I might add. I like a lot of the newer point and click adventure games too (though there aren't too many of them about and I realise they may annoy the purists) especially The Longest Journey.
    This thread from livii also had stuff on an Hamlet text adventure. Now that's literally interactive fiction!
  • Theres a program which allows you to create your own point and click adventure here. I've never used it, though, so have no idea if its any good.
  • There's tons of these on Home of the Underdogs, along with a lot of other abandonware pc games. I got The Lurking Horror there, a great Lovecraftian IF game. I still have nightmares of tedium over the Zork maze, though...
  • I grew up on Zork I and Adventure, which was released as a "retro" game on the C64. (along with Eliza, Life, and Pong. Awesome package.) Well, not so much played as flailed around pointlessly until I was old enough to figure out what the heck was going on. Made some neatokeen 3D maps, though. Only two things ever really disappointed me as far as these go - finding out what grues looked like in one of the Zork spinoffs (which just seems...wrong), and Z: Nemesis, which was an interesting enough Myst clone but lacked any sense of humor. Always meant to learn TADS or the like, but I am lazy. Still, I'll check them out again. Thanks!