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Introduction

Although he's been playing them for many years, one of Kevin's newer hobbies is writing interactive fiction / text adventure games (hereafter "IF"). A quick web search for the term interactive fiction will no doubt get you all the information you need about this sport. When last we checked, Google returned millions of matches for the term.

IF games are an ancient and venerable form of entertainment software. Modern and classic games are readily available (try the Google search above), and can be played on almost every type of computer platform, from PDAs to PCs to mainframes. A history of interactive fiction can be found in chapter VIII of the Inform manual.

Kevin writes:
I first played Zork on a DEC 10 mainframe at the University of Pittsburgh. Infocom didn't exist yet. A couple of friends introduced me to the game. We logged in, started it up, and got the now familiar "You are standing in an open field west of a white house..." So I asked my friends, "What are the rules?"
"You don't know", they grinned.
"OK, what's the object of the game?"
"You don't know."
"What are the legal commands?"
"You don't know."
This was annoying. So I typed open the mailbox to prove to them that they were going to have to be a little more forthcoming. The computer responded, and I was hooked. It had understood what I'd typed (or so it seemed)! For the next couple of weeks, I majored in Zork.

The people who wrote Zork eventually graduated and formed a company called Infocom, where they productized Zork into a trilogy of games for various personal computers. You can still get and play the original Zork Triolgy. The games are available for download at several internet sites, including this one.

Award-winning Games Authored Here

--Well not here, exactly, but over at Flavorplex. Kevin and Peter Seebach have teamed up to write a few games, all of which are available at the Flavorplex web site. The most popular of these is Janitor. It faired well in an open competition, winning the authors a gift certificate, as well as international renown and respect.


Collecting Infocom Games

Those old Infocom games, in addition to being great fun to play, were also known for their packaging. Although they released some of the games with several different versions of the packaging, all of the games were released at one time or another with the "grey box" packaging. These packages contained extras (sometimes called "feelies") that served as accessories to the game. Although we have all of the games, Kevin has decided to also collect the grey box releases of the games. For a look at what was in each of the packages, take a look at this cool site and also this one. Click here for a current catalog of our collection.

Recommendations and Comments

Click here for a list of Infocom games Kevin has played, along with brief commentary on each one.

Here is the list of post-Infocom text adventures that I have played and enjoyed enough to recommend:

Interactive Fiction Links

Here are a few IF-related sites that we frequent.