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Microsoft consumes Activision; and a plea
- chewychewy 3y agoZork for XBOX in 4K coming to Game Pass.
- smilespray 3y agoI'm looking forward to the new IAP hint system!
- LeoPanthera 3y agoI bet you could use some kind of generative AI to automatically render images of each scene from a text adventure.
- acheron 3y agoI'm sure ChatGPT+DALLE would do a decent job of it, as long as one of the scenes doesn't accidentally trip its badness filter.
- cryptoz 3y agoI'm working on this right now actually! here's a screenshot https://imgur.com/a/a1S2Mb0.png https://imgur.com/a/a1S2Mb0.png it will be part of https://cosmictrip.space https://cosmictrip.space when it is done, hopefully soon! GPT-4 generates the games themselves, the turns as well as optional action butons, and also generates DALL-E image prompts for each turn. DALL-E generates just based on the current turn right now but I'm working on adding context.
- serf 3y agothis exists as a plugin for a popular MUD client (MUSHClient) already, it's pretty neat.
- chasingthewind 3y agoSomebody already did this for Zork though I can’t find the link at the moment. When I looked at it, it was interesting, but not particularly good. I’m sure it would get better in time.
- beej71 3y agoIt was AdventurImagen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpCrBBj6AWE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpCrBBj6AWE
- jlarcombe 3y agoor they could pay an artist to draw them
- robertlagrant 3y agoOr you pay an artist to draw you playing the game.
- wiz21c 3y agoI don't remember turtles in Zork
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- glimshe 3y agoI wonder if younger people would play these games if they were fully graphical, as in all rooms have graphics, animations, objects disappear when you get them etc. I got my son to play the text adventures for some 30 minutes, but he lost interest and went to play Roblox... In another instance, I got him to type a full 100-200 command walkthrough while I read the commands, he enjoyed it but didn't want to do it again.
- keyle 3y agoYou know what, I'd play that! Give me a new Zork story, great font, great music, I'd be all over it. Obviously you'd chose actions from a list due to the controller, but with progressive disclosure you wouldn't really feel like cheating the game.
- michaelmrose 3y agoI don't think there is enough meat in the zork games without the interesting aspect of figuring out exactly what one can do and open ended input via the keyboard.
- newsclues 3y agoXbox probably has a great collection of titles that could run on Steam Deck or other handhelds. Game Pass for Handhelds, so you can get access to their archive of handheld optimized games.
- PostOnce 3y agoGames made before I was born whose copyright won't expire until long after I'm dead. They ought to be public domain by now. In fact, games should have a shorter copyright term since they're harder to preserve and less valuable over time. I still have a box legally-purchased of Zork games (CDROM editions) and manuals and a copy of Planetfall here, but should I feel any shame about pirating them? I don't think I should. Counterargument to myself and trivia: All the authors of Zork are still living. (I assume they receive no royalties, though, based on how the game industry generally works).
- echelon 3y agoIf AI makes creation of all artistic works easier and cheaper, then the value of old content becomes significantly lessened. We should adapt new copyright policies to not only preserve these works, but to push people to keep innovating.
- eru 3y ago> If AI makes creation of all artistic works easier and cheaper, then the value of old content becomes significantly lessened. Even today, creation and publication has become a lot easier and cheaper since Shakespeare's times already. But people still like his work, despite a flood of new material having come out since they were first published. Of course, Shakespeare is exceptional in his cultural cachet. > We should adapt new copyright policies to not only preserve these works, but to push people to keep innovating. What do you have in mind? Archiving is already mostly allowed by current copyright policies. And I'm not sure how copyright policies can 'push people to keep innovating'? At most you can try to get out of the way. Or, if you are being sneaky, you can lobby for arcane and arbitrary censorship rules: after all, limitations breed creativity. Eg East German political jokes were a lot better than West German ones. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Void https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Void or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oulipo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oulipo
- rrjjww 3y agoI believe it was Schopenhauer who said in one of his essays that (I’m paraphrasing) just because content is new, doesn’t make it good, because with a constant stream of new content, what’s good doesn’t stay new for long.
- ChicagoDave 3y agoWe all know Microsoft bought Activision _for_ the Infocom IP. It’s clearly the most valuable asset.
- toast0 3y agoRevenge of the Cresent Hawk's Revenge (I think Infocom was just the publisher, but they were in the startup voice sample)
- kromem 3y agoYou jest, but don't forget that to Microsoft leadership their battle in LLMs is likely seen as even more important than all of team Xbox. Getting nerds who grew up on Zork to effectively give free problem solving training data and pay a subscription price for the privilege by grounding RLHF data collection into a beloved franchise might not be that low on priorities over at Microsoft.
- ChicagoDave 3y agoSo the future sentient AI will have a strange love of trophy cases, brass lanterns, and jewel-encrusted eggs? I’m down for that.
- qup 3y ago> down You descend down a rickety staircase, into darkness. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
- 7thaccount 3y agoConsider whose fault that could be...not a match or a torch in your inventory!
- HenryBemis 3y agoHow about you cast an orb of light?
- guidedlight 3y agoWant some rye, course ya do.
- WillPostForFood 3y agoActivision is also actively selling the Zork collection on Steam. I'd expect that to show up on Gamepass. It includes: Zork I, Zork II, Zork III, Beyond Zork, Zork Zero, and Planetfall https://store.steampowered.com/app/570580/Zork_Anthology/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/570580/Zork_Anthology/
- baggy_trough 3y agoIt's pretty hard to play, unfortunately. It runs in a strange dos box and the "terminal" is pretty ugly to deal with.
- cable2600 3y agoGet this: https://davidgriffith.gitlab.io/frotz/ https://davidgriffith.gitlab.io/frotz/ and use the datafiles from the DOS version in DOSBox.
- beej71 3y agoThey could still do this after a CC licensing, too. The press would probably give them a sales boost. :)
- m463 3y agoalso on GOG, DRM-free: https://www.gog.com/en/game/the_zork_anthology https://www.gog.com/en/game/the_zork_anthology
- timbit42 3y agoIt's also DRM-free on my Commodore 64.
- thaumasiotes 3y agoNot just those; Return to Zork, Zork Grand Inquisitor, and Zork Nemesis are there too. (Zork Nemesis is pretty unlike other Zork games.)
- glimshe 3y ago
- markx2 3y agoHave been gaming since the mid 80's and text adventures were a main feature. Years later and I owned Lost Treasures 1 and 2 then the Masterpieces CD. I topped that with IUB.zip - pretty much everything Infocom. Jason Scott then produced Get Lamp - I have a coin - which brought so much of that era together. I view text adventures, be they Infocom, Level 9 or others, as an inspiration to others. A re-release could only be a good thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Get_Lamp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Get_Lamp
- tarek_computer 3y agoCool. Curious about IUB.zip. Can you share more details when to find it.
- markx2 3y agoInfocom Universe Bootleg is 397.5MB A yandex search will reveal various torrent links. It should unzip to six folders; Bonus Games Infocom Games Infocom InvisiClues Infocom Universe Bootleg.nfo IUB Database Software Tools
- tarek_computer 3y agoawesome. thank you
- 7thaccount 3y agoText adventures are awesome. I'm sad that I missed out on that era. What do you think about all the modern text adventure games built on stuff like Inform7?
- bluGill 3y agoSome of them are very good, some are garbage (to be kind). As you would expect from amateur productions. Inform7 is a reasonably good system/engine and can produce good games, the only question is the quality of the authors which varies.
- demondemidi 3y agoI think Zork sank into the swamp long ago. "Want some rye, 'course ya do..." I mean, come on, let's not clutch our pearls after that abomination.
- benstein 3y agoWhy hate on that game? It had both great puzzles (challenging yet approachable) AND was pushing the envelope of CD-ROM as a new technology, specifically the use of video + celebrities.
- thaumasiotes 3y agoThere was a lot to love about Return to Zork, but it was made in the Sierra model of suddenly killing you whenever you made a mistake that, in most cases, couldn't even have been foreseen to be a mistake. Oddly, the text adventures were nowhere near as punishing.
- bluGill 3y agoInfocom wasn't that punishing, but back in the day a lot of other IF was. It was very common for a while to have some random "guard" who would kill you - this was entirely a random number generator that you would be killed when walking into the room. Players hated it: the only thing you could do is save often and restore and try again, which was a big waste of time (really bad if you were loading from floppy on an 8 bit computer and so had to insert disk A again).
- thaumasiotes 3y agoOK, but the question is, since Infocom's text adventures weren't particularly punishing, why the sudden change of philosophy in RTZ? Lucasfilm was already doing very well with no-failure-state graphical adventure games in 1992.
- demondemidi 3y agoExcept for Spellbreaker, which had an early path in the game that seemed like an easy solution but would break the game until the very end and you had NO idea what went wrong. (Incorrectly using Girgol to solve the ragweed problem, when you need it for the VERY LAST PUZZLE in the game to freeze shadow you before he jumps into the tesseract). I think Starcross had a path like this too, but I don't recall. And Infidel never allowed you to get the full score because you were ... an infidel. But that irony was lost on 15 year old me.
- bitwize 3y agoMicrosoft has actually been relatively good about making their abandonware source-available, especially if it's historically important like Infocom stuff is.
- LispSporks22 3y agoThey bought Activision to make me install Edge somehow, didn't they...
- kromem 3y agoYeah right. Microsoft isn't about to let go of IP rights around the most well known text adventures. But at the same time, I'd be surprised if they don't do anything with them either. The synergy between their investment into OpenAI and their acquisition of Activision might suggest that they'll be doing quite a fair bit with those franchises indeed.
- talideon 3y agoThey're not being asked to give up their IP rights: they can create new franchise entries. It's about making the original z-code files redistributable. How OpenAI and text adventures could possibly fit together is beyond me, though.
- drooopy 3y agoKen and Roberta Williams have hinted that they would be willing to revisit old Sierra Online games, provided that Microsoft would agree to lend them back those IPs.
- jackvalentine 3y agoCan’t wait for a remake of the VGA remake of the EGA original mother goose.
- theragra 3y agoI think it might be hard from the legal standpoint to open source everything in these games. Game and source code - maybe. Other assets might involve dependencies on third parties, who need to give permission.
- supermatt 3y agoThe comments are quite interesting. Reaching out to people at microsoft in the actual comments. This is the real value of activitypub, and completely transparent to visitors to the blog.
- sigmar 3y agoWoah. Wouldn't have noticed that without seeing your comment. Pretty cool to see.
- avh3 3y ago> If you happen to work at Microsoft Activision Blizzard Github King, ... nice.
- activitypea 3y agoHey, if anyone's gonna do it, my bet is on the company that revived Battletoads ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- growingkittens 3y agoI think copyright law should be different for originators vs. owning individuals vs. legal entities. Once the legal rights of a work are separated from the originator, the work should pass to the public domain faster.
- sbuttgereit 3y agoWhich harms the originator since a potential buyer can't realize as much value for the purchase of the IP. If the originator isn't in a position to exploit their creation directly, their ability to offer it to someone who can is reduced. So the extended time an originator could hold on to it would only serve larger originators; smaller creators would see their work devalued.
- growingkittens 3y agoI think you misunderstand what I mean by originator: the actual creator of the work. There are no large or small originators because an originator can only be an individual. If a company or different individual hires someone to create work for them, the work would transfer from the originator to the company or individual, thus putting it on the faster track automatically.
- piaste 3y agoSo, if I create art and sell it online directly to customer, I get the longer protection, but once I register as a one-person LLC, my copyright becomes shorter? Or am I still the originator, and it only shortens once I hire another person? Or do I keep the longer protection as long as the company is 100% originator-owned, and only lose it after someone else buys a share?
- growingkittens 3y agoOriginator sells online to customer without transferring copyright: originator gets the longest protection. Originator sells online to customer and transfers copyright: shorter protection applies, since the originator no longer owns it. Originator transfers work to LLC: shorter protection applies. You gain LLC benefits for a shorter copyright term.