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A Cabinet of Infocom Curiosities
- andrewstuart 11y agoAwesome. Could some rich entrepreneur please take this to the next level and fund a few million to completely scan in high quality every magazine in Steve Meretzy's collection?
- radnor 11y agoThat would be fantastic, especially the Computer Games Strategy Plus magazines. Many, if not all, of the Computer Gaming World magazines can be found here: http://www.cgwmuseum.org http://www.cgwmuseum.org
- Tepix 11y agoWow, this collection turns out to be beyond the wildest dreams of all Infocom lovers. It's also pure gold for game designers.
- jacquesm 11y agoIf you've never experienced what text adventures were like, this would be a fun place to start: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/hitchhikers/game.shtml http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/hitchhikers/game.shtml (requires flash) HN thread about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8960933 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8960933
- mrob 11y agoHHGTG is notoriously difficult. If you've never played a text adventure before you're more likely to find it frustrating than fun. Instead, I recommend playing something more modern. There's a community of people making these games who hold an annual competition, and the winner is usually very good: http://ifwiki.org/index.php/The_Annual_IF_Competition http://ifwiki.org/index.php/The_Annual_IF_Competition I particularly recommend the 2007 winner, "Lost Pig". You can play it in a Javascript interpreter here: http://iplayif.com/?story=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ifarchive.org%2Fif-archive%2Fgames%2Fzcode%2FLostPig.z8 http://iplayif.com/?story=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ifarchive.org%2Fi...
- jerf 11y agoIf you want to start with an Infocom game, I found "Nord and Bert Couldn't Make Head or Tail of It" to be a fun little amuse-bouche. It's a wordplay game instead of a lengthy story full of old-style adventure logic, so you really can't get "stuck", and is also an interesting example of a game that fundamentally could never be anything but a text adventure. (This may depend on your wordplay ability. A quick check on Wikipedia says fan consensus on the difficulty ranges from "Standard" to "Expert". Oh well. It's 2015. You're only about 30 seconds away from a walkthrough. Given the nature of the game, it won't ruin anything if you have to consult a walkthrough once or twice. In the meantime, it's the only Infocom I've ever beaten without a walkthrough at all. My brain seems to really, really not jive with text-adventure game logic.) Granted, it's very different than a text "adventure", but I think if you've never played a pure text-based game, it's a very gentle and genuinely entertaining experience.
- hardmath123 11y agoI've been looking for a copy of that game for a while now. Is there an online version or a z(5,8) version I can run with frotz or something? Is it even in the public domain?
- jerf 11y agoCrap, I thought GOG.com had the Infocom collection digitally available, but I seem to be mistaken, they just have a couple of things. Nobody seems to. I bought it a long time ago, when digitally downloading things was a novelty. Well, if the copyright gods will forgive me, it should be in this collection, which I can find no particularly legal way to purchase in a way that gives money to any rightsholders: http://www.myabandonware.com/game/the-lost-treasures-of-infocom-ii-3dp http://www.myabandonware.com/game/the-lost-treasures-of-info... I don't know, but it is likely the core z5 files can be found in there with a bit of hunting. The first Lost Treasures of Infocom is legally available for the iPhone: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/lost-treasures-of-infocom/id577626745?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/lost-treasures-of-infocom/id... Though, bizarrely, not for Android.
- CIPHERSTONE 11y agoAwesome!
- jordanpg 11y agoEarlier this year, when I realized that all of the old Infocom games were in the public domain, I spent some time playing Zork I, Border Zone, and HHGTTG -- the ones I played most often when I was younger. There was some sentimental fun to be had, but these games take a tremendous amount of time to play and are difficult in a way that modern games are not. Their puzzles are almost unsolvable in some cases, or can only be solved by combining every permutation of every verb with every noun in every place to get the right answer. Relative to what's available in the modern gaming realm as well as conventional fiction, I've also been pretty underwhelmed by what the Interactive Fiction community is putting out, especially the games that are purely web-based. There are some authors, Andrew Plotkin comes to mind, that have picked up the Infocom torch, but the feeling that you are using 0.1% of what your computer can do at about 5% of the rate your mind can work is difficult to shake for me in our modern era.
- mrob 11y agoNone of the Infocom games are in the public domain. The copyright of most of them is held by Activision, which sells them as iOS ports.
- jordanpg 11y agoOops! Err, I just made that assumption based on the ease I had in finding them. There are a variety of places to download them right off the web.
- Bud 11y agoAbout 57391 neurons which have not fired in this particular way since 1989 or so have just fired. Wow. I remember rushing to the store to buy Infocom games. Which were incredibly expensive on a student budget, by the way. Kids these days are so spoiled by how cheap games are.
- ddingus 11y agoAwesome. I love these games and played a lot of them as a kid. Managed to solve a few too. In the early 00's, I ended up with one of those little HP Palmtops running Windows CE. Could not figure out what to do with it, until I found it would run Frotz. So I packaged up a few of the good ones, not too tough, and put in in the car for the kids. They actually played 'em. One would run the palmtop, reading it, and everyone would suggest options. They got through a few long trips doing that. Today, a phone would work much better than that old Palmtop did. Somebody should make the voice input for these dead simple.
- DerekL 11y agoI installed Zork on my Fossil Wrist PDA, though I never actually played it much. I mainly played Sudoku.
- TuringTest 11y agoThe Get Lamp documentary looks awesome. It's CC licensed so you can watch it for free, but they also have some physical DVD copies left with all the extras.
- VLM 11y agoIt is awesome. As is his BBS documentary. Speaking of monetizing physical media, my wife went to some effort and expense to get me a personally signed copy of the BBS documentary for Fathers Day a long time ago, that was really cool. As a disclaimer, I'm a financial backer of the upcoming 6502 documentary, looking forward to it.
- rsync 11y agoRun, don't walk, to see the BBS documentary. It is fantastic in every way. Especially the segments with the fidonet guy.
- ghaff 11y agoIt's more a series of interviews than a true documentary but, that quibble aside, it's a great window into a world that really hasn't been well documented otherwise because it happened outside of the main thread of the Internet's evolution. I see one (self-published) book on Amazon about BBSs but there really isn't much out there.
- textfiles 11y agoAh yes, let's get into THAT debate. That's not a quibble - it's barely an opinion.
- ghaff 11y agoCome on Jason. With a bigger budget you would probably have done things a bit differently. But as I said, it's a well done (and appreciated) look into a neglected area of computing history. And frankly the interviews are probably the most important thing. I'm not being critical.
- chris_wot 11y agoHas the rift between textfiles.com and Wikipedia ever healed?
- hoodoof 11y agoIs there an official mirror policy to ensure multiple copies remain alive?
- sp332 11y agoArchive.org keeps at least two copies, Jason Scott probably kept one somewhere, but nothing official. You should grab it too - and join #internetarchive.bak on efnet if you want to help backup more collections :) Also https://archive.org/donate/ https://archive.org/donate/
- fapjacks 11y agoJason Scott is a hero. And also, of course, Steve Meretzky.
- adenylyl 11y agoIf you’re interested in Infocom stuff, I’d also recommend Jimmy Maher’s ongoing series on the history of Infocom: http://www.filfre.net/tag/infocom/ http://www.filfre.net/tag/infocom/
- CamperBob2 11y agoThere's some interesting creative subtext in Steve Meretzky's collection of documents from Sorcerer. ("Agency" refers to Giardini/Russell Inc., the advertising agency Infocom used to create collateral and 'feelies' for the game packages.) Client/Agency met to discuss Agency's recommendation that Enchanter II should be called Spellbreaker (rahter than Sorcerer), and that Enchanter III should not be called Spellcrafter. After discussion, Client/Agency agreed to proceed with Client's preferred name for Enchanter II, Sorcerer. Name for Enchanter III will be discussed at a later date. I can't wrap my head around the idea that the ad agency is in charge of coming up with the game's title. That certainly isn't how things would have been done at any other game company I'm familiar with. I've always had a ton of respect for the quality and literacy of Infocom's collateral, so it was fascinating to learn how much of that was outsourced to a generic agency that would have sandwiched their work between full-page ads for furniture sales and TV commercials for used car dealers. It seems that not everybody at Infocom was 100% on board with G&R's work: http://i.imgur.com/WNBUY1w.png http://i.imgur.com/WNBUY1w.png Overall, these documents offer a really interesting peek inside the sausage factory. Thanks to Steve M. for making them available and to Jason for doing the legwork!
- ghaff 11y agoI'm not sure what is so unusual about an advertising agency having input into a product name. In the B2B tech industry, you'd typically engage with a separate firm for product naming, but in consumer sales branding and product names/titles are part of the whole advertising/promotion package. I don't read that so much as the agency being in charge of naming as arguing that name X would be more effective. For better or sometimes worse, good agencies are about more than just coming up with ads.
- CamperBob2 11y agoGame development in the 1980s was not exactly something you'd recognize as the "B2B tech industry." It was a business populated exclusively by control freaks (and yes, I'm speaking from experience.) Without getting too specific, let's just say that the titles of the games we were working on would not have been subject to delegation outside the creator's office, much less outside the company.