Interactive Fiction

[Psionicist]

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

> x mailbox
The small mailbox is closed.

> open mailbox
Opening the small mailbox reveals a leaflet.

> get leaflet
Taken.

>_

Remember Zork, the old comuter game text adventure? It appears there's a large community who create their own text adventure games / interactive fiction using the Zork game engine. Some of them are very well written, interesting and should i say fun!

For example, here's a Cthulhu-inspired horror "game" I can recommend: http://www.wurb.com/if/game/17
To play it you need a program such as WinFrotz: http://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/infocom/interpreters/frotz/WindowsFrotz2002.zip

This thread is not only about the games / stories though. What I'm really interested in: Have anyone here created their own games or stories to try out an adventure idea? Or otherwise used these programs as a DM aid?

Cheers.

 

[Airwolf]

Wow, Zork. I haven't thought of that game in years.

Thanks for posting those links.

 

[LostSoul]

For example, here's a Cthulhu-inspired horror "game" I can recommend: http://www.wurb.com/if/game/17

Anchorhead is a great game. Had a lot of fun playing it.

 

[dougmander]

I love interactive fiction games! I've played several of the Zork games, and sampled some of the other old InfoCom games, like Leather Goddesses of Phobos, which came with a scratch-and-sniff card keyed to particular moments in the game. Since that time, the programming languages and word banks have become much better, and the trend has strayed away from fantasy-based adventures to mysteries and pure logic puzzles. There isn't a paying market for them anymore, but the IF community is alive and well, writing and sharing games among its members.

The premiere site for interactive fiction is brasslantern.org. It includes some great advice about adventure design that is useful for pen-and-paper RPG designers too, but it also has tons of links to IF programming resources, free games, reviews, and contests.

I have done a bit of programming in ALAN (AdventureLANguage), which is available for free on the web, along with several other IF languages. Creating an IF adventure is incredibly time-consuming, and for me, addictive. I wrote a short adventure called Mad Robot Lab for a class a took a few years ago, and I have a much larger, unfinished adventure called Road Trip.

 

[fusangite]

Talk about bringing back the memories! I loved those games when I was a teenager -- no graphics just pure text. Infocom was my favourite software company. I even played the original Adventure, the game written in Fortran that started it all. My favourites were, I think, Zork II, Lurking Horror and the two games Douglas Adams wrote: Hitchhikers Guide and Bureaucracy. Those of you who have never played Bureaucracy really missed out -- it's right up there with the Dr. Who episode Shada on the list of great things by Adams that few people have seen. I too learned to program just so I could write these games. I wrote crappy natural language parsers and everything (in Pascal, no less).

What a great thread to wake up to! I'm going to check out those links right now.

One more thing: A friend and I still discuss the bizarre playstyle of a longtime gaming associate in terms of these games. Although she has never played them as far as we can tell, her D&D behaviour is nevertheless best described in that Infocom syntax:

Well, when you get to the bottom of the well, you just find a rusty knife.
> Get knife.
Okay. It's a pretty inferior knife; it was made out of copper so it'll probably just break if you try to use it.
Later...
Well, you've reached a windswept crossroads. There's an old signpost there with decaying leaves blowing up against it.
> Cut leaves with knife.
Ummm... you cut some of the leaves.
> Cut sign with knife.
The knife disintegrates trying to cut through the old wood; the pieces fall into the leaves.
> Get pieces.
You can't really do much with the knife; it's so decayed that soon it'll be little more than a metallic paste.
> Rub paste on all.
Sign: The sign looks just slightly browner and more decayed now.
Leaves: Nothing happens.
Rogue: The rogue looks unhappy and asks what you are doing.
Fighter: The fighter looks unhappy and asks what you are doing.
Barbarian: The barbarian growls at you.
Well, looks like there's nothing left of the knife, except for flecks of rust you can still see on a couple of leaves.
> Get leaves.

Essentially, this player's normal style is best expressed as GET ALL followed not long after by USE ALL WITH ALL.

Anyway, thanks for the trip down memory lane!