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. Read the rest

It's the 20th anniversary of Anchorhead, Michael Gentry's seminal horror text adventure; to commemorate the occasion, Ryan Veeder and Jenni Polodna worked with 84 developers to create Cragne Manor, a tribute, whose puzzles are ingenious, frustrating and amazing. Read the rest

In the Occult Defence Agency Budgeting Simulator, you are placed in charge of the budget for an organisation whose mission is "defending the United Kingdom from paranormal threats. Vampire covens, stray werewolves, pixie swarms, cultists with funny robes and impractical daggers, unlicensed hauntings, and more obscure matters" -- but you are British, and that means your boss is a government minister who insists that you make headline-grabbing "swingeing cuts" every year. Read the rest

Space Alert is a simple and clever proof-of-concept text adventure game made using Apple's new Shortcuts app for iOS 12. Demo video above. From creator Marcel Wichmann:

Apple recently released iOS 12 and with it Shortcuts, an app that let’s you automate a bunch of stuff on your iOS devices. I didn’t find any useful way of automating anything, so I built a game. A text adventure, to be precise. It’s short and kind of stupid but… it’s free?!

Space Alert (via WAXY) Read the rest

In Seedship (previously), you play a colony ship's AI, piloting a thousand hibernating colonists through unimaginably vast stretches of space, scanning candidate planets and deciding whether or not to found a colony there. Read the rest

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." Read the rest

Renga in Blue is a deep-divin' blog about old text adventures. Author Jason Dyer writes up his thoughts on adventure games from the 1970s, having completed all of them.

curious firsts:

– First defined player character: Aldebaran III– First use of choice-based interaction in a parser game: Stuga– First dynamic compass interface: Spelunker– First dynamic puzzle generation: Mines– First free-text conversation in an adventure context: Local Call for Death– First adventure game comedy: Mystery Fun House

The first iteration of Dial-a-Grue, in 2011, was to kit out an old rotary dial phone with an embedded computer and text-to-speech engine so that you could play Zork with nothing but the handset. The new, 2.0 version of the project, is "to port Zork I (via a z-code interpreter) to an embedded platform, and enclose that and an old modem inside a telephone, so that the game can be played from a teletype, TDD, or old computer with an acoustically coupled modem." (via JWZ) Read the rest

The internet is addicted to Slither.io, a startlingly compulsive multiplayer mashup of the classic "Snake" game and Tron's "Light Cycles": block other snakes with your body, watch them explode into a cloud of orbs, then eat the glowing remains in order to grow longer and larger. It's a game of fast reactions, split-second decisions and low-latency internet connections.

Naturally, then, I wondered what it would be like as a text adventure. Read the rest

Interactive fiction is a thriving genre, but its commercial heyday is long gone. Here's Leigh Alexander on how Kickstarter could usher in text adventures' long-overdue renaissance: "There's more than just nostalgia contributing to a potential revival for interactive stories. A broader gaming audience means appetites for game forms we might have once called "casual" in another time -- and furthermore, the popularity of tablets and e-readers means there's a real appetite for game forms that take advantage of a culture now habituated to reading on luminous screens in ways prior generations were widely not. [Gamasutra] Read the rest