Just about all the commercial and widely distributed text adventures from the 1970s-1994ish (plus some other stuff) is in the recently released eXoIF package. It includes extras and documentation for everything, preconfigured emulators for gameplay and in many cases multiple platform versions. (Although the Infocom games are all running in native modern interpreters, which I find boring.)
Interesting! It’s definitely useful to have so many games in one place, especially it includes a lot of games I thought of trying before but didn’t know where to get (including a bunch that Garry Francis extolled at one point, like Transylvania and The Neverending Story).
I was surprised to see that there were several modern games included. I saw that Swigian was included, which is nice given the company, but surprising; there are also 4 versions of that game (no pictures, no pictures and stylized as text messages, pictures in Inform with blue background, Adventuron with pictures and black background). I wanted to try downloading this to see which one they put in, but I didn’t realize it was a torrent. I only have vague memories of torrenting many years ago and I’m not sure how it works (and is it still a generally safe thing? Does it mean my computer acts as a remote server for others?), so I’d be interested from someone who does have this installed to see which version ended up in use.
Oh wow, and one of the only 20 other games from this century was Constraints (2002)! I was a fan:
So the curation is a little random - and I likewise don’t know where things are at with torrents these days - but between that and Swigian they’ve got good taste.
The Swigian version in this is the Inform build it looks like. It says Release 2, Serial number 231214.
Torrenting is easy, but it’s peer to peer and people will be able to see your IP if that sketches you out. Use qbittorrent if you’re going to grab this, and a VPN if you want to maintain a little privacy.
The project has a pretty active discord, and you can recommend any games you feel should be included.
This release was version 1.0, and a follow-up version is being worked on as we speak. One thing I reported to them is that the Solid Gold version of HHGG doesn’t work, so that should be fixed in the next release.
The Alice in Wonderland/King’s Quest conundrum was somewhat fiercely debated on their Discord, lol. I believe it came down to Alice in Wonderland is listed on Moby Games as interactive fiction and King’s Quest isn’t, and the Exo dev didn’t want to deal with people asking why Alice wasn’t included. Apparently a lot of people take Moby as scripture.
Other people thought the standard for inclusion should be “do you control movement by typing commands,” but they were overruled.