How far should we *hack* the original Infocom games?

My apologies if bumping is frowned upon here, but I get the impression this forum is more lenient about bumps than many places.

Perhaps I’m biased due to having spent 20+ years on a forum dedicated to hacking old video games and preserving gaming history, and perhaps I’m biased because remaking games is a concept I was introduced to before I was introduced to text adventures.

I personally would be quite fine with, and would love to play remasters of classic Infocom titles that bring them in line with the sensibilities of modern IF, and had I still a working eye, I think it would be awesome to re imagine the Zork Games in the style of a 2-D Zelda(And conversely, I’d love to play a reimagining of a 2-D Zelda as a text adventure). The puzzles don’t necessarily need to be made any easier and the death count can still be high(Heck, add in a death count like some Zelda games do and have no deaths as a potential challenge run if you like), but puzzles that reset if you mess up bad enough and making it so you have to go out of your way to put the game in an unwinnable state and never need more than one save file and less fighting with the parser would go a long way towards making these games less impenetrable. And hey, maybe include a Hardcore mode that disables the protections against unwinnable by mistake while still providing a more modern parser.

To my mind, it wouldn’t be fundamentally different from someone Hacking Pokemon FireRed to implement the content that was added in Pokemon Yellow or hacking A Link to the Past to make a 16-bit version of Zelda I.

Granted, given that parser games are more similar to one another than most video games, even ones from the same franchise, there might not be much point to Hacking one of the Zork Trilogy games if you wanted to make a fan-made Zork IV instead of just writing it from scratch with a modern IF engine.

Definitely not in favor of trying to have any fan-made remasters replace the originals(heck, had I still a working eye, I’d be tempted to replay both Pokemon Red/Blue and FireRed/LeafGreen and both the NES, SNES, and GBC/A versions of Super Mario Bros. through World).

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