Interactive Fiction

This tiny corner of the web is to celebrate and preserve the history of text adventure games, primarily the Infocom Games. I'm including some other pioneers and a handful of the best modern interactive fiction (IFComp winners). I mainly wanted to make the Infocom games playable in a browser in a convenient manner for everyone. Some of these are unfinished and unreleased games only somewhat recently unearthed.

Infocom died as a company, and their trademark was abandoned, but they were bought up by Activision. In the strictest sense, many of these games are owned by Activision though they've treated them as abandonware. The full source code for these games have been released and resides on Github.

While these games are "ancient" in the parlance of technology and how quickly it moves, I remember playing these myself as a kid. The written word itself is timeless. While most of these have no real graphics, neither do novels and we haven't left those behind. This medium deserves more respect, with the pioneers and the classics of the genre being treated for precisely what they are, great works of fiction.

Miscellaneous

Legend Entertainment was founded by Bob Bates of Infocom fame, who was joined by the legendary Steve Meretzky, who worked on 7 Infocom classics. They really continued the Infocom tradition though they added high-quality graphics to go along with a text parser. I have attempted to ressurect Steven Marsh's Unofficial Legend Text Adventure Page here.

Scott Adams created some of the very first home computer games of all time. He (like the others) were inspired by the early mainframe version of Adventure. Some have called Scott Adams the father of computer video games. These were designed for very early home computers where memory was at a premium so the text is intentionally very sparse. You can play his games and Brian Howarth's Mysterious Adventures games in the browser here.

Another British studio that was innovating. All of the Magnetic Scrolls games are already playable in a browser easily enough right here!

This was a British studio. A few of these games had a US release but I wasn't aware of any of these as a kid. However if you grew up on the other side of the pond, perhaps you are more familiar with these early adventures.

Yet another British publisher. These games started out at Cambridge University on the schoo, mainframe before receiving commercial ports years later under the name Toplogika. While they only produced interactive fiction for a number of years, they didn't go out of business like the rest. Instead they shifted to educational software.

Penguin Software was an American studio who changed their name to Polarware. They made a variety of video games including 8 early computer adventure games. Initially they had a very simple VERB NOUN parser and then later a more complex parser they called COMPREHEND.

Angelsoft, Inc., based in White Plains, NY, was founded by John R. Sansevere and Mercer Mayer. The company created eight text adventures in 1985/86. Six of the eight were book or film adaptations. Among the titles: Forgotten Castle (a.k.a. Sleeping Beauty), Voodoo Island, Stephen King's The Mist, and Rambo - First Blood part II.

IFComp Winners

The Interactive Fiction Competition is an annual celebration of new, text-driven digital games and stories from independent creators. It has been going on for 26 years and still going strong. They occassionally also have separate mini-competitions. For the purposes of this list I'm just including the 1st place winner every year to higlight SOME of the best new interactive fiction, however I encourage you to check out their site to discover more.

XYZZY Winners

The XYZZY awards ran from 1996 to 2018. Unlike IFComp, which is aimed at awarding the best new game from an independent creator each year, the XYZZY awards were meant to emulate the Oscars and hand out multiple awards across several categories. In the sake of brevity, I'm only listing the Best Game winner, though you can browse their site to go over all the categories and discover even more games. Most of these are playable in the browser here except 80 Days and Cryptozookeeper.

This page uses Parchment as an interpreter for Interactive Fiction. Find out more.