Just curious. For those who haven’t seen the show, the main character plays Zork in the pilot and gets superpowers from killing the troll. (More or less.) Anyways, the show is the reason I ended up playing Zork (and other IF) for the first time.
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<googles ‘chuck tv show’>
2007…
<crackledy-pops his way out of a mouldering office chair, shaking dust off and approaches so the feeble voice can be heard>
I remember ordering The Lurking Horror from a print magazine advertisement over the phone (which was attached to the wall with a cord) and waiting five weeks to get it delivered in the mail. I also remember haunting Waldenbooks at the mall (malls used to have stores that sold books) and seeing Infocom games displayed for sale in the front.
Our 7th grade Science teacher let us play Colossal Cave on an Apple IIe computer wheeled up from the computer lab. It was on a floppy disk that made a lot of loud noise when it loaded. It was that or Lemonade Stand.
I’m glad though that adventure games get occasionally acknowledged in current media. I’m sure there are people who discovered them through Bandersnatch last year. And the CYOA (branded) books started in 1979, though I imagine they were more an offshoot of Dungeons and Dragons and gamebooks.
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I first played Zork on an old IBM PC. I distinctly remember that orange phosphor monitor. It belonged to a kid up the street named Charles, but we called him Chuck.
Now I’m racking my brains trying to remember if that was my first text adventure, or if it was Hitchhiker’s on my older brother’s C64.
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So what I’m reading in this thread is that some of us are super old, and we knew about IF from way back at the dawn of recorded history.
And other people are new arrivals, which is nice because every community needs new members if it wants to survive over time.
The “re-discovery” stories are also fun — like @jrknoch’s declaration that she found the IF community again this year.
(I had no idea that an IF community existed, but I was looking for help with Twine a few years ago; that’s when I made a joyous re-discovery and learned that text adventures are very much Still A Thing.)
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I think god was a boy when I got into Text Adventures! But seriously I played games like The Hobbit and any of the Level 9 games such as Lords of Time on my dear old ZX Spectrum. Then spent may a happy weekend trying to make a good game using The Quill. Discovered that IF was still a thing about 2004.
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I’ve only been an IF fan since, idk, since Dec of last year? I just found ‘Chuck’ on Netflix, wound up loving it, and then decided to see what the Zork reference was all about! And I’m sure glad I did. IF is such a fun hobby - I’ve got to say Fabularium has been awesome for my daily commute to uni.
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Probably the first parser games I played that I can recall was on this compendium of 1000 games for pc. Most of the games were shareware demos, and there were a number of text-based rpgs (like a Windows version of Avatar). I was into graphic adventure games and didn’t really see the appeal of text-only versions of the same thing- in fact for years I visited the Brass Lantern site and skipped all the articles talking about text adventures. I only really got into playing them when I started making them, coming onto The Chinese Room project.
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Yes, I found that Inform was the best puzzle game of them all! Thanks for the reference to Fabularium, I think I’ve finally found a good reason for buying a smartphone!
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I discovered text adventures halfway the 90’s or so, when the only computer I had was my dad’s old 486 which would balk at anything heavier than text mode games in linux. So I discovered frotz, and played a whole lot of infocom and other parser IF games. I also played quite a lot of roguelikes. Maany years later I still have a special love for ASCII games. It’s strange how that goes.
I don’t know anything about “Chuck”, but that sounds pretty fun as premise for a series.
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It’s a funny series, and it has all kinds of geeky references throughout. It’s mainly a satire of the thriller/spy/superhero genre, but it’s also genuinely fun.
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Hmmm…I hadn’t heard of the show, but then, I get my fix by Netflix and YT these days. I guess it might be worth the effort to tune in, at least once.
I got my start somewhere around 1980, give or take a year or two, on PLATO. We had a nice fresh port of the original, filename adventl. Things happened, I didn’t finish the game, and I’ve been wishing for another chance all this time. Of course, when I finally bought a computer, I had to have Zork, but it really wasn’t the same. Fast forward to a couple of days ago…when I finally learned that something very close to the original was available, and here I am.
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The first text adventure I played was probably a type-in called Return of the Diamond from a book called Games and Other Programs for the Acorn Electron. The first one I bought was Stranded by Superior Software, but the one that got me hooked was Scott Adams’ The Count. I was given a bootleg copy of Melbourne House’s port of Adventure, called Classic Adventure, and I remember finding it fascinating but really, really difficult.
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Some time in the 21st century, I got an email from a young 'un who’d played one of my parser games and wanted to congratulate me for inventing this cool new kind of game.
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I bought a smartphone purely for IF reasons too 
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