The thread you link to is where it all started. 
Based on the Twitter poll it does seem to suggest that enhancements are the way to go! 54% of the vote.
Adam
3 Likes
I keep thinking that it would be a fun project to make screen reader-friendly versions of the Infocom games that are not, by replacing the ASCII art or similar with completely new but equivalent puzzles, but I really have no idea what the screen reader-friendly equivalent of, say, the Royal Puzzle in Zork III would look like.
7 Likes
You’ve just hit the nail on the head and why mods/hacks/enhancements (pick your preferred term) are worth the effort in my opinion! You’ve described a perfect scenario where a replacement puzzle, something more accessible but remaining true in spirit to the original, would absolutely be beneficial. 
3 Likes
Guilty!
Off-topic: my Beowulf/OE professor hated Heaney’s translation of Beowulf, and I’m pretty sure that one student would mention it just to wind him up.
It’s the ASCII graphics mentioned by @Angstsmurf. Screen readers can’t do anything with them. Off the top of my head, I can think of The Royal Puzzle (Zork III), submarine navigation (Seastalker), hieroglyphics (Infidel), The Unseen Terror (Enchanter), and the hedge maze map (Hollywood Hijinx). The various graphical puzzles in Zork Zero deserve mention as well. There may be others.
I would consider tackling such problems acts of translation, personally. In a translation, no matter how faithful it is, something is always changed or lost. It’s accepted, even if people disagree how much can or should change. I mentioned Heaney’s Beowulf above. I don’t think many would use the word “faithful” to describe it, but it is certainly readable by a wide audience.
There’s a spectrum of faithfulness, then. Tackling something like the Royal Puzzle could be as simple as sparing a player the hassle of typing in commands verbatim from a walkthrough, or as complicated as devising a text alternative! I’m not sure what approach would be best, though I’m sure a lot depends on the specific case.
4 Likes
@AmandaB " They" also rewrote Enid Blyton’s Famous Five books and I hate it. There’s a song from my favorite band New Model Army from 1985 that addresses this theme and our tendency to bring everything to our level. New Model Army - Drag it Down - YouTube
So you can imagine I’m not a big fan of altering original Infocom sources. These games are a product of their time and should remain as such, with a few exceptions though. A good example is Mini-Zork II, which was left on the Infocom drive in a state that made it impossible to complete the game. I wrote about this in ZZAP!64 issue 7. So for me a clear differentiator is drawn between the game’s code and the story and/or content.
@zarf brings up an important question here. What is the target audience for such a work?
@Adam_S If you hack an Infocom game for educational purposes, either for you or fellow authors, or if you simply alter it for your own delight, i think that’s fine. But I doubt there will be much of a target audience for this. Still, if it makes YOU happy, do it. I do believe though any alterations other than fixing bugs will place your work in the realm of fan fiction, where it is absolutely necessary to flag your work as such.
Being a Sales and Marketing person in my day job, for me it is all about the target audience. I can’t switch that on and off as over the years it just became the way my brain works. So when I decided to get back into writing text adventure games in 2017, I wanted to make sure that I properly transport my visions and stories into enjoyable games but at the same time I wanted to reach a broad audience. The best product is pointless if nobody knows about it. This mindset alone would personally prevent me from going back to an Infocom game and improving some of the riddles. There wouldn’t be much of an audience for this other than fellow authors and maybe a few of the die-hard Infocom enthusiasts out there. The majority accepts these games as what they are, as you should accept a book like Famous Five on a Treasure Island as what it is.
My personal decision for my own work was building upon the Infocom heritage and then making it a contemporary homage. Back in the day, you played weeks or months to solve a game but these days people want to casually experience a story rather than dying 20 times until they know how something works. So it is a thin line between challenge and frustration. A few hours on Saturday evening is fine, but three weeks until you get past a door riddle just doesn’t work anymore these days.
The broadest audience for my games lies within the retro scene, which is more vibrant than ever these days. Hibernated 1 DC has been downloaded more than 12.000 times and Rabenstein just very recently hit the 10.000 mark. Even Amy Briggs played H1DC with expressing it was her first IF piece this millenium.
In the retro scene it is all about reliving childhood memories. But our brain actually stores idealized memories. We all had that moment where we started playing a game back from the day, only to realize it’s not as good as you remember it. I got so many messages from people who played Hibernated, then, hungry for more, started playing an Infocom game only to get disappointed. This might actually lead to the conclusion that it would be a good thing to bring down Infocom games to today’s standards and expectations, but no.
Infocom games are a product of their time and should remain as such. The world has moved on, so should we.
6 Likes
my perspective is influenced by my country (one with ten times the history of the United states…) but I think that altering the story/narration on an Infocom story file is equivalent to put graffiti on an ancient Monument. But cosmetic improvement can be done, no one here criticised the night illumination of the Flavian Amphiteatre aka The Coliseum, whose, incidentally, is external to the Coliseum. but I’m not sure that an internal illumination of the Coliseum will be well received.
Out of methaphor, I think that when Frotz (and other major 'terp) gives externally QoL enhancement, I think that perhaps isn’t needed a major QoL fixing.
But, If we treat Infocom classics as, well, classics, I think that a “critical edition” (e.g. adding notes, comments, analysis and like) is fair, if not welcome, game. but AFAIK no one has ported inform’s notes and menu support contrib libraries to ZIL… (I’m pretty sure that .z8 format allow adding substantial notes and a sizeable menu even to Trinity…)
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
4 Likes
Some very wonderful conversation here (all of it in fact), thank you to everyone for providing your carefully crafted responses.
I think essentially I will continue to hack resources, add commands, apply counter balance to the more unfair situations, and in short I will be doing this primarily for myself but I will continue to share the edited files (clearly flagging that my edits are non-canon, homebrew efforts) so that should anyone wish to enjoy the benefits or just have a play around themselves then they can do so.
Thanks!
Adam
3 Likes
My dad rewrote them while he was reading them to me. When I was older, he told me he’d found Timmy the dog to be a total pain because it was always snarling obviously at bad guys and foreigners. So he’d just remove Timmy from each story, on the fly, by having him get lost or fall off a cliff.
A friend asked me if this had anything to do with my dislike of dogs. I said I couldn’t rule it out. But also, a dog chomped on me when I was a kid.
-Wade
6 Likes
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, leave Infocom games alone. It’s fine to fix some obscure bugs, but there’s already so many modified games out there, not to mention all the different releases on different platforms, that it’s impossible to know what’s what.
If you want to hack the code for your own amusement, go for your life, but don’t publish it anywhere to add to the already confusing array of Infocom games.
And as far as censorship goes, that’s just downright criminal. It’s just an example of George Orwell’s ‘Big Brother’.
You should also ask yourself whether this is a good way to spend your life. Life is too short to waste it hacking someone else’s code. I’m sure you’d get a lot more enjoyment writing something brand new.
If you want to write a new game set in an Infocom universe (or fanfic), that’s fine. At least the rest of the world can then share the enjoyment of a new game, rather than one or two people wading through the 57th variation of Zork I to try and work out how it differs from the 56th variation.
6 Likes
It’s easy to know what’s what! That’s what the IFDB entry is for. Or my Infocom web page.
No fanfic-shaming, please.
Anyhow, any updated or modified version of a classic game is going to say that up front. Look at the GitHub - heasm66/modified_zork1 page – it says “Modified” on the label, and lists exactly how.
6 Likes
As Garry and I both spend a lot of time wading through endless unofficial ports of (non-Infocom) adventures that aren’t as upfront about their source of inspiration, I can understand why he might not relish the prospect of hacks. 
5 Likes
My gut reaction - and my vote in the poll - was to leave them as they are, artefacts of their times. However at a push I would be in favour of things that solve accessibility issues. Primarily by that I mean issues for disabled players, especially blind players. I’m not a huge fan of changing the parser for these specific games.
I’ve also got my academic historian’s hat on here. Much of my academic historical research involves untangling the essence behind things that are often obfuscated and have been changed over time, and through different hands. I’m not a fan of seeing that done more. Which is probably also why I am reluctant to see it done here.
I’m also hugely respectful of the original game authors, and fear that in a revamped game it might not be clear which bits are which to the players. Yes there may be information in the source code, but is the resulting playing experience as clearly attributed as it could be?
Others have mentioned how historic texts are annotated and written about by scholars without changing them. That is something I am totally in favour of. I can see good cases for doing that sort of thing with the Infocom games, to add an extra layer of interpretation on top, that works alongside the existing game play.
But yup I’m an old fogey! I’m also concerned about the legality of hacks, and the longevity of the results.
Re ZIL I’d much rather see more user friendly original games show the power of the system. If people want others to code in ZIL now show us new proof of concept. Move it forward.
Just my thoughts …
5 Likes
I would be in favour of that, as well. However, in the case of the Infocom puzzles that rely on ASCII text images, I’m not sure that you could fix these without changing the puzzles from how they were originally intended. Perhaps a version with changed or removed puzzles for visually impaired players?
2 Likes
It would be interesting to have an old game with a separate window of text talking the player through the game as it is played. The game itself would be unchanged. It would have to be smart enough to be interesting and entertaining for every different player and would probably take you the rest of your life to implement.
A perfect mixture of:
- Stately home tour guide. This house has been standing since early adventure days…
- Nature documentary. Here we have a grue…
- DVD audio commentary. In this scene…
- Implementor’s comments. We got the idea for this puzzle from…
- Office paper clip man. Looks like you want to…
- Cruely diminisher. Now that you’ve broken the egg…
- Bug explanations and suggestions. This didn’t work properly because…
- Orwellian history rectification. This text would nowadays be written as…
- Accessibility information. The original puzzle doesn’t work on a screen reader but…
- Genius.com lyrics. This is a reference to an in-joke…
- Bible concordance. Grues appear in the following places…
- Chess computer. The best next move is… That was a bad move…
- Original Invisiclues
- Helpful friend
- Adventure game tutorial
- Playthrough
- Internet links
You could also maybe knowingly switch between different versions of the game, which would openly talk you through the differences (cheats, rewritten text, updated puzzles etc).
10 Likes
I have very fond memories of Planetfall as a really tight sci-fi game in a body of work that’s full of sword-and-sorcery or gumshoe games, and played it again a few years ago to re-live that feeling with an eye to introducing my kid to it. And gosh, I had absolutely forgotten how tedious the food clock was.
Well it turns out there’s an edition now that fixes some bugs and removes the food clock. I wish I’d had that one!
4 Likes
This is why I propose assigning release number above 400, Zork zero v393 being the highest infocom serial number, for the modded story files (the “serial” having a Y2082-03-08 bug…)
I think is feasible doing (and keeping up to date) an “Infocom modding fact sheet” cataloging the variants, together with an “infocom consolidated mods list” (having to do with open source since 1994, I know well how forking led to crosspollination of features…) but this forum ought to be used for reaching a common set of guidelines.
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
2 Likes
You just summed up (from the modern day players perspective) why I enjoy creating new “homebrew” versions.
2 Likes
I understand everyone’s views and worries, but trust me you’re not going to be stumbling across one of my hacked versions and wondering whether it’s legit or not. Aside from sticking my name at the front alongside the original creators I also tend to stick in a sort of subheading which explains what the version does.
As for other points around it being almost insulting to the original creation and creator, I can’t agree with that because it’s not erasing an original piece. It’s simply creating a new variation (clearly marked as such) that does something fun or different to the original. Whilst I don’t know the Imps well enough to go for lunch with them I have had enough email conversations with them over time around creating new and edited versions to know that they honestly don’t care; they won’t feel slighted or insulted.
As to creating new works instead of editing existing old ones, this largely holds true but for me personally I’ve long come to understand that I much prefer tinkering with existing code and doing fun stuff with it than creating something brand new. That’s why “Galliways” is moving along but my FNAF fan game has hit a wall; I just reach a certain point and the ideas dry up. It’s fine, that’s just me being honest about my own creative limitations!
So, I’ll just continue to play with the source code to create variations that do odd, different or fun stuff, they will be shared but they will be sufficiently edited in the title section so that you’ll immediately know not to include this in any official version control documents.
Adam
4 Likes
“The time for talking is over! It’s time to push buttons!”
Cutthroats - Edited/Hacked/Enhanced (or if you like Ruined/Scarred/Defiled!)
Removed McGinty’s X-Ray vision, if you have the Passbook then he won’t see it. He will see it however if the Passbook is dropped, or resides on (but not in) another object.
Would someone care to be my Beta Tester please? Thanks! 
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Ys9NbrOM6uX3GjQXfeKqzM5sDmB0TzAx?usp=sharing
Adam
3 Likes
I know we’ve had disagreements over this Adam, but I’m happy you’re pushing ahead with your vision, and taking on board all the comments. Thanks for an interesting discussion. All the best!
2 Likes