Essential must-play text adventures prior to 1998?

General
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I’d echo the comments about reading Jason’s blog. Jason’s approach of playing “all the adventurers” (pretty much in order) gives him a very unique perspective on older games and he has the ability to find something interesting or special about virtually everything he plays.

For identifying games beyond 1982, which is where Jason is up to at the moment, there are some other excellent blogs out there; such as The Digital Antiquarian and Aaron’s 50 Years of Text Games.

There are also resources for specific niches; for example The Classic Adventurer covers some of the big (and not so big) games from the UK text adventure scene.

You may also consider checking out the top games in the main annual IF competitions. Or focus on trying to look at a selection of games written using a range of different authoring tools.

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Just downloaded a version of The Hobbit. I’ll see if I can get it running. Thanks!

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Neat! Added to the library!

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Oh, that’s interesting. I didn’t know that. I’ve been curious about The Count, but maybe I’ll wait on that one.

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All good info, thanks! So far, my experience with the golden age of text adventures is similar to my experience with the golden age of comic books… Hit and miss, still figuring out the rules/limitations of the medium, and not “user-friendly” by modern standards, but interesting nonetheless.

My own introduction to parsers was in the Sierra graphic adventures like King’s Quest and Gold Rush, though I’m actually more experienced with the point-and-clicks like the VGA Quest For Glory re-makes.

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Thanks, I’ve been reading about Time Zone over on The Digital Antiquarian already. Hadn’t heard of Aaron’s book until last night when I started listening to the Gold Microphone podcast about A Mind Forever Voyaging (which I’m currently playing). I will check out The Classic Adventurer.

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You’ll find experts or specialists on here for every niche imaginable. So if there are specific things you’re looking for then I’m sure someone can help. There are a lot of old text adventures out there. My main area of interest is ZX Spectrum games… and there’s probably at least 2,500 of them… so I mainly focus on homegrown Spectrum titles, which limits things to about 1,500! :wink:

(Circling back to Jason’s blog, he has a recommendation for some specific games to check out on the index page… All the Adventures | Renga in Blue )

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I am of course somewhat tooting my horn when I say that my early era was the Golden Age. :)

But it’s not entirely unreasonable to think of the Infocom era (and Scott Adams, Magnetic Scrolls, etc) as a small-scale, briefly successful trial run for the 1990s and IFComp.

Infocom published 35 parser games in ten years. By 1999 we were seeing that many every year, and they were doing things Infocom never considered.

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I played The Count on Commodore and don’t remember this. I’ll have to replay it when I get a chance. I’ve been meaning to get rid of my Commodore stuff but never got around to it.

Speaking of Commodore: Does anyone remember the Thriller Series or Junkyard series made using AdventureWriter? I have them on disk, but not sure they were ever made available for emulation as they used some funky disk protection.

I can’t find any references at all to the Junkyard series even existing. Pity, I never finished it. I did finish all the games in the Thriller series though. They’re not bad.

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I’m not familiar with the series, but a search for “C64 junkyard adventure” on the Internet Archive yielded these results, which sound like it:

It seems that it was also known as “Alvin the Android”.

Some links: Alvin the Android (1983) - MobyGames, Computer Game Museum Display Case - Alvin the Android: Junkyard 1, 2, & 3, :: CASA :: Junkyard.

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Yep that’s definitely it. I tried a bunch of different searches without success.

As I recall you are left for dead in some space junkyard and have to transfer yourself into an android body to survive. I’d forgotten the “Alvin the Android” bit.

Many years ago I remember stumbling upon the author’s website, but have no idea if it still exists.

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Absolutely agree with this. I first played IF - Colossal Cave actually - in 1980, and played text adventures throughout all the 1980s. Yes in the UK there was phenomenal creativity then especially in the Spectrum scene, though distribution was more problematic. However I don’t think anything in the 1980s matches the amateur explosion we have seen since the early 1990s, fuelled in a large part by Inform and TADS, and then later via Twine and other forms of IF. So yes, I’m rather wowed by things since. 80s great, but since then superb.

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AdventureWriter is actually what we in the UK call The Quill… CodeWriter obtained the rights to produce some versions for US machines from Welsh company Gilsoft; making their own tweaked version for the C64 along with Apple II, Atari 8-bit and DOS releases.

The games from the Thriller pack are available in the usual Commodore 64 archives. They were written by John R. Olsen, who cut his teeth making adventures for the TRS-80 in the early 1980s. Many of his Quilled games were ports or reworkings of his earlier BASIC games for that computer.

See…
http://solutionarchive.com/game/id%2C3959/Frankenstein+Adventure.html
for example. Jason Dyer has covered the TRS-80 version of that “Thriller” game on his blog.

As linked to previously, the Junkyard games were also written with the Quill/AdventureWriter…
http://solutionarchive.com/game/id%2C2367/Junkyard.html

Not only can you easily play the games, but you could also extract all the source code from them.

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I’ve been somewhat reluctant to suggest specific titles here. What is essential is incredibly subjective. Also I am very much aware that I haven’t played everything, not even all Infocom games.

However if I may refer to my own IFDB list of recommended titles Viv’s top 10 favourite IF games - Recommended List there are a number of titles on there that would be worth checking out:

  • The Hobbit (1983)
  • The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1984)
  • The Guild of Thieves (1987) - by British company Magnetic Scrolls
  • Curses (1993)

However other games spring to mind too, for this thread. Eg

  • Hunt the Wumpus (1972)
  • Adventure (1976) also known as Colossal Cave - available in lots of versions
  • Multi User Dungeon or MUD (1978) - playable via Richard A. Bartle: MUD the original MUD game
  • Knight Orc (1987) - by British company Level 9
  • Christminster (1995) - arguably the other big influential and proof of concept game alongside Curses in the early Inform era

And yes, definitely check out some of the other games on Aaron A. Reed’s https://if50.substack.com

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Does this still happen in the current Gargoyle version of ScottFree? I haven’t tested Strange Odyssey very well, but I the one “glimpse” I know of in The Count should work. If it doesn’t, please file a bug report.

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Thanks, there are some I am not familiar with on that list!

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Sounds like the situation’s advanced since I last tried these. I better check them and report back.

-Wade

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The Thriller series was written by John R Olsen of Free Spirit Software and published by CodeWriter in 1984. These are readily available from any of the C64 archive sites. Look for them by the individual game titles: ‘Night of the Walking Dead’, ‘Perils of Darkest Africa’ and ‘Revenge of the Moon Goddess’. John was one of the great writers of the golden era. He published at least 20 games for various platforms from TRS-80 onwards. Two of the SoftSide Adventure of the Month series (‘Arabian Nights’ and ‘Volcano Island’) were written by him.

‘Junkyard’ was a three-part adventure written by Steve Peoples and published by CodeWriter in 1983.

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I would say the golden age of IF was the eighties. Not because games were better back then, but because those games are both foundational as well as nostalgic. This, I think, is the way the golden age of comics works, and I’ve always been satisfied with that characterization.

So far as foundational works go, I write a lot about Infocom games in terms of their textual content. This means I value some games more than other people do, and vice versa. These are the Infocom games I would recommend playing. I recognize that player tolerance for puzzle difficulty will vary. In my opinion, it’s better to see the games with hints than it is to skip them outright. The original Invisiclues are easy to find; use those (and their maps) instead of a walkthrough. For the trilogies, take long breaks between games if you like. I can see Zork being especially exhausting back-to-back.

The Zork Trilogy is instructive in a lot of ways. For one thing, we get to see Infocom evolve from collaborative development to its auteur development model. We still see the influence of that model’s formation today. It’s likewise an opportunity to consider a trajectory that includes growing narrative sophistication as well as increasingly atmospheric text and worldbuilding.

Deadline requires both a spatial and temporal map to navigate. This was very innovative at the time, both for its rather extensive (for the time) conversational text as well as for its genre (locked room whodunnit). The kind of clockwork implemented in Deadline is largely gone from IF, but lots of video games have picked up the slack with day and night cycles and scheduled events/encounters (Breath of the Wild is only one example).

The Enchanter Trilogy has a very satisfying system of magic, and its influence can still be felt today. While my game is not a traditional puzzler, Enchanter heavily influenced the design of its central mechanic. Both Enchanter and Spellbreaker have interesting and cohesive game worlds. Sorcerer, while still enjoyable, never reaches the heights of those games. Still, it’s good to play them all.

I may well be the person who has written the most about A Mind Forvever Voyaging: twelve posts in total. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did! It abandons the Zorkian, thing-centered model of play to focus on qualities, events, and exploration for its own sake.

If AMFV abandons the Zorkian model of play, Trinity perfects it. For the rest of the 80s, Trinity would be the highest expression of the puzzle-heavy exploration game.

Plundered Hearts is the most narrative-focused Infocom game, and it feels quite modern at times.

If you still want more… Note that I consider all of these games worthwhile, but I recognize that there are many non-Infocom games to play.
Suspended
Infidel
Wishbringer
Planetfall (some would say it belongs on the list above, which is fine by me)
Ballyhoo
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (arguably could be moved up due to its novel use of modular design)

Keep us updated on your journey!

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Thanks for the lists! I am playing A Mind Forever Voyaging now and quite enjoying it. I was overwhelmed at first by being thrown into a difficult-to-map city and expected to fulfill a list of objectives I wasn’t sure how to approach. Once I made it past that first part, things have gone a lot more smoothly. The premise and style (political/dystopian sci-fi) are very much in line with my taste.

I’ve heard Trinity is a similar sort of thing done with a totally different approach, so I’m looking forward to trying that one at some point.

I’m actually surprised at all the recommendations for Hitchhiker’s Guide… I thought that one had a reputation for being nearly impossible! I will have to give it a go. Loved the books when I was a teenager.