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