I’m not sure if this is the right category, but:
Are there any audiobooks (well-read transcripts) of IF works?
And if not, would someone from the forum please make some? I’d love to listen to them!
(I found a few things on YouTube, but they all seem to be “Let’s Play” videos where people keep chiming in with their own comments…)
Hi Olaf!
Unfortunately, I don’t know of any audiobooks. But I’d like to put this on record: I’d really, really love to hear a high-quality full-length audiobook.
I don’t know of any audiobooks but there were times when I considered making some for my own works. I didn’t think there’d be anyone interested, though, so that got put on the shelf for now… guess I might have to revisit the idea.
Just to be clear, you mean without any interactivity, just following one particular player’s path through the story, right?
With interactivity it would be even greater!
Well darn, I just discovered that I would really like to hear a dramatisation of a Club Floyd transcript, with different people doing the different voices. I had no idea I would like that until I read this thread.
Yes, exactly! And no “speedrun” either (but probably also without any parts where the player is stuck for a long time). A “normal” playthrough where you can really see how someone plays through the story, so you get a good sense of the game.
With interactivity, it would be a different thing — then you couldn’t just listen to it in the background, as you often do with audiobooks. (Of course, it could also be nice if the game was beautifully narrated while you’re playing it.)
I think the Club Floyd transcripts would make just great scripts for audio books!
That reminded me of a conversation I had with Pinkunz a looong time ago. Creating an audio version of a limited parser IF sounded like a really cool idea. Pinkunz even recorded some voice so I had already 1 voice actor available. Now I only need to hire Arnold to reprise his role of the Barbarian 
.
As a practical mattter:
Verbose or normal mode? It can get really old listening to room descriptions again and again.
If the game has a lot of back and forth, narrate the intermediate rooms or just the destination unless something happens on the way?
Transcript of a winning playthrough or of a regular playthrough, with circling around and experiments that don’t work and clever error messages and error messages that are not so clever?
He probably doesn’t have much to say, does he? Should be possible to find someone here who speaks broken English. I’d volunteer myself, but I’m afraid I don’t have the voice for audiobooks
There was a sort of similar thread a while back, IF Longplays for blind people (Apr-May 2025), which talked about (inter alia) spoken transcripts.
I’m going to mention again what I mentioned then, the CLASH of the TYPE-INS podcast.
Now, while adjacent, this is very much not the audiobook experience:
But it might be useful input when deciding what preparing an audiobook-like narration of a traversal might look like.
Perhaps even brief mode? I guess that would have to be decided on a case-by-case basis.
I think the same applies here.
One will certainly get the best result if the transcript is edited where necessary. If a player is running back and forth between two rooms without anything new happening, that bit can probably be left out. ‘Guess the verb’ segments can probably be shortened too.
It’s also likely that some games are better suited to this than others.
The question is what the end result should be. I’ve heard podcasts where two players work their way through a game whilst discussing it at the same time. That absolutely has its merits (and I’d like to see more of it), but it’s simply not an audiobook that aims to do justice to the author’s text as best it can.
(In German, there’s also a distinction between Hörbuch (an audiobook) and Hörspiel (a radio play). The latter, of course, involves more effort.)
Absolutely!
There’s certainly no ‘one right’ way to do it. But there seems to be quite a bit of interest in IF audiobooks. If my pronunciation wasn’t so rubbish, I’d give it a go myself, but I’m more than happy to help out wherever I can!
For two reasons:
I thought it might be useful to see a case study in action
I just felt like having some fun
…I just recorded myself reading the AMFV sample transcript from the manual straight into my phone’s recorder. One take, no edits, no rollbacks, a couple of mistakes. I just wanted to go with it and commit until the end. Naturally something like this would need more takes and more quality recording, but hey, I had fun and it may be interesting to see, in action, what we’re talking about.
BTW, I’m Portuguese and my accent is British-leaning. Again, one take, no edits, just rolling with it. Room for improvement, to be sure, if I cared enough. 
Related thread: Is there such a thing as an audiobook version of an IF?
(Maybe we could add an audiobook tag.)
That’s awesome! When will the full version be available? 
This is actually the entirety of it. 
‘Cause it’s not the actual A Mind Forever Voyaging; it’s the sample transcript that comes with the infocom manual. Infocom provided sample transcripts for their games, which I thought would make a pretty nice test case for this!
Sorry, I didn’t know this thread existed.
It’s also very recent, so we’re onto something big here! 
Oh, I’d missed that…
I love these ‘fake’ transcripts anyway; they should be a genre in their own right!
For what it’s worth, a couple of people breezed through here earlier this year to promote new audio-first IF development systems in progress. They haven’t posted lately, so who knows what their status is.
I looked up both of those systems. PlayNook has apps shipping.
Forgotten Skies has an early website that seems to be working to some degree.