Tuesday, January 8, 2008

Infocom Games

You are in an open field west of a big white house with a boarded front door.There is a small mailbox here.




Remember Zork I? If you do, you'll recognize the line above as the starting of the game. I just loved the Infocom games, you might remember the old text (that's right text, just letters and stuff) adventure games the likes of ....... While Infocom didn't invent interactive fiction, but they certainly made it popular to the tune of 20-30 games on every major platform of the early-mid eighties, so it is easy to see that I was pleased to discover there now there are resources out there to play them again via emulation/interpretation in pretty much any platform that supports java.
What you need to do to play the is a program that will run z-code and allow you to run z-files and some z-files themselves. Listed below are some resources for public domain z-files, the actual infocom games can be a little hard to come by, but diligent searching will turn up results.




Z-Machine interpreters:




Other resources:

1 comment:

Unknown said...

I remember playing some of those Infocom games when I was just a tad younger than I am now. Hitchhiker's was always my favorite and I used to wonder what happened to the sequel. Company with problems or no, some of those old Infocom games were just fantastic. There's a "Best Infocom Game" list over at UnSpun that ranks them. Hitchhiker's currently stands at 5 and Zork is numer 1.