Three days ago I found an iPad app with the 25 forgotten treasures of Infocom. Now, some days later, I managed to walk through my first if Moonmist. I feel like I found a part of me, that was long missing. Beyond that, I think if should be back en’vogue these days, because of the raising amount of more louder and more flashy television and computer games. IF is the greatest thing I found the last 5 years. Lets get it back to greatness
When and what was your first IF expirience?
Looking forward to hear from you. Greetings, Patrick
I’m a semi-latecomer. I had been aware of the games in the 80s (some friends had them), but by the time I actually got around to playing them there were already Infocom nostalgia bundles (genre sets, in particular … this would have been around 1993).
b[/b] I was at the time a staff editor at a videogame magazine in Vermont called Interactive Entertainment, and a contributing editor to Strategy Plus (I basically made a living by playing Doom all day) and we were running a video interview of Steve Meretsky; he was promoting his new projects, stuff like Hodj N’ Podj and Superhero League of Hoboken and the (then allegedly forthcoming) Planetfall graphic adventure. I found him fascinating, and he had the elder editors yattering on about how awesome Infocom had been, which piqued my interest. b[/b] A dear friend of mine was a beta-tester on Anchorhead, and she was urging me to give the newly-minted fan-community a try since she heard me babbling about the games as a consequence of (A).
The combined forces of (A) and (B) … combined with my own inability to afford, at home, the kind of computer I had at work, put me on the path to actually giving the games a try.
Trivia: Possibly the most obscure in-joke in my own game, ToaSK, is that there’s a Dwarf who sometimes shouts “Woofta!” - a reference to the whack-a-mole game in Hodj N’ Podj.
Aww, man, I have a second-hand copy of Hodj ‘n’ Podj lying around somewhere. My attempts to get it to run on a modern machine have met with continual failure.
Let’s see. My first IF experience, as a very small child, was Jacaranda Jim, which, frankly, was kind of crap, but enticingly so. Somewhere along the way I must have encountered Adventure and Zork, because I have vague confused recognition of the early games of those, but I wasn’t all that taken by 'em. The first game that really got me excited about IF as a form, the first one I thought was actually good, was Spider & Web; the one that got me thinking of IF as a thing I could make myself was Worlds Apart.
(So my general feeling is that the greatness of the Infocom era was surpassed some time ago; any further greatness is just outdoing ourselves.)
My memories are muddled, there’s so many games in there I can’t tell which was the first… The Zork collection was one of the first, certainly… my first experience with a parser was Leisure Suit Larry 1 and it blew my mind there and then…
Jeez… The Doppy and Pru Trilogy, Jacaranda Jim, Zork, Crypt, T-Zero, Deep Space Drifter, Unkulia, Babel, Dungeons of Dunjin… looking back, my first experiences with IF were really all over the place.
