Microsoft finally getting to devour Activision means it gets Candy Crush and Call of Duty and other big-ticket modern game franchises—things it needs, given the slack sales of its latest-generation game console. Andrew Plotkin notes it gets another classic series: Zork! — Read the rest

Good news — Covid is coming to Las Vegas this month!

Stop by booth W1847 at InfoComm and learn how Covid supplies "the education, corporate, government, health care, hospitality, worship, and broadcast markets."

Sadly, they won't be handing out boxes of Ayds or bottles of Corona at the booth, but the company with the unfortunate name will have a lot of swell literature about 4K HDMI AOC cables!

In the 1980s, Infocom popularized the term "interactive fiction" and turned the text adventure into a profitable medium. Ingenious programming and broad literary horizons brought it (and one or two rivals, such as Magnetic Scrolls) explosive success, for as long as it lasted. — Read the rest

Jason Scott has made the source available for every one of Infocom's classic and genre-defining text adventure games (previously) for the Apple ][+ and its successors, posting it to Github under the historicalsource account.

Andy Baio's been slipped a hard drive containing the whole network share from Infocom, creators of the legendary text-adventure game Zork and The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy; he's mining the drive's many treasures and today he's published a long account of the abortivr Milliways game, a sequel to H2G2 set in the Restaurant at the End of the Universe:

1.

Ben Burry has hooked up a Jabber bot to a copy of the old Infocom Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy text adventure game. Now you can play H2G2 over IM — or over phone, if you have an IM-to-SMS gateway running! — Read the rest

Begging for a remix. I also like this frame where the dude gets mad at the other dude.

BoingBoing reader Avi Solomon scanned this odd infocomic brochure from India, and explains:

The Yoga Institute in Santa Cruz, Mumbai is unique in catering mainly to middle-class Indians who usually have a family and face the pressures of urban life.

Ethan Persoff collects and scans ultraweird vintage comics, and hosts them on his ep.tc archive site.

He's just uploaded four new gems, including an AIDS prevention infocomic starring Madonna. The booklet was distributed on one night only, during a 1987 Madison Square Gardens concert (holy crap, that was twenty years ago!). — Read the rest

Ajit Monteiro says: "At the BBC they have the Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy, Infocom game from 1984, written by Douglas Adams. Its a text based adventure game, reminiscent of games from way back when. The two episode game works pretty well even ported to flash." — Read the rest

Anna Washenko posted From Infocom to 80 Days, a primer on a genre of game that encompasses the most elementary and elaborate forms of play. Text!

But whatever its production value or artistic merit, at heart, interactive fiction is simply words on a screen.

[This ran on Sunday in my weekly newsletter, The Magnet]

I bought my first computer, an Apple ][e, in early 1985. I think the total price (including the monitor and external 5 ¼" floppy disk drive) was about $3,000. I had to get an Apple credit card since I had no savings. — Read the rest

The heroic age of text adventure games was dominated by Zork and Zorkalikes, many from the games studio Infocom; the text adventures' fortunes sagged when improvements in computer graphics lowered the average gamer's age, and then rose again when BBSes carved new spaces for text-based play.

The venerable Infocom text-adventure game Zork spawned the Infocom Z-Machine V3, a virtual machine that could run "programs" (games) from the commercial to the hobbyist, including "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Planetfall and Curses."

Kevan Davis's Wikitext is an incredibly clever mashup of Wikipedia and Infocom-style text adventure games: starting with a random Wikipedia entry, it gives you the article summary, an 8-bit-ified version of the main photo, and "directions" to the articles referenced by the one you've landed on. — Read the rest

In the 1970s I was a member of the Science Fiction Book Club. Whoever the art director was at the time, they were producing some excellent covers. I still have the Edgar Rice Burroughs Barsoom novels with Frank Frazetta covers and illustrations, but I somehow lost The Best of Fredric Brown (1976) with this Richard Corben illustration of a Yeti embracing an explorer. — Read the rest

Well, this is wonderful—Jason Scott, creator of the GET LAMP documentary and tireless historian in the service of games, is releasing a huge trove of scans from the archives of Infocom veteran Steve Meretzky.

Infocom, of course, was a leading developer of mysterious and beautifully-written computer text adventure games in the 1980s. — Read the rest

I always say I feel as if I was raised by the adventure game creators of the 1980s: Wry, cryptic guys and gals who built impossible caves, surreal worlds and kingly empires for me to play in. They feel like family I've never met. — Read the rest

Yesterday, March 11, was Douglas Adams' birthday. Did you know you can celebrate by playing the 1984 Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy game in your browser at work this instant?

Although games made with a text parser — you know, where you type commands like TURN ON LIGHT or LOOK IN POCKET or S to travel "south" through described space — are increasingly a lost art, the Hitchhiker's Guide game, made by Adams and Infocom's Steve Meretzky, was radically accessible for its time. — Read the rest

Zork co-creators Marc Blank and Dave Lebling are to be awarded the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences' Pioneer Award, a prestigious prize, and a well-deserved one. It's amazing to think of Zork's creators as just a couple of guys who're still kicking around, doing stuff — like learning that the authors of Gilgamesh are living down the street and sometimes doing speeches at publishing industry banquets. — Read the rest

Love these (sadly unattributed) Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy tattoos. Illustrating the flowerpot/whale scene is particularly poignant, as it is perhaps the most humorously existential moment in one of the great existential comedies of all time.

Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy Tattoo

(via Forbidden Planet)