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.
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:
- http://frotz.homeunix.org/frotz/ The program for Everything from Linux to XP. It has been ported everywhere.
- Under Mozilla http://gnusto.org/
- http://www.speakeasy.org/~russotto/zplet/ifol.html Z-machine in Java.
- http://frobnitz.sourceforge.net/ Frobnitz z-code interpreter for Palm OS.
Other resources:
- http://infodoc.plover.net/ Has documentation scans for all your favorite Infocom games.
- http://gallery.guetech.org/ Another source for documentation scans.
- http://adventure.if-legends.org/Infocom.html Really good info about the games as well as platforms they ran on.
- http://web.mit.edu/6.933/www/Fall2000/infocom/ In depth history of Infocom.
- http://www.infocom-if.org/ Nice site with game outlines and Zork I-III available for download.
- Not Infocom, but very nice nevertheless- Adventure aka Colossal Cave (the original text adventure game), Scott Adams games, and something like 300 others in z-file format. http://www.ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archiveXgamesXzcode.html
- Here are the technical specs for the Inform-Compiler just in case you just need to know such things. http://www.wolldingwacht.de/if/z-spec.html.
1 comment:
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.
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