There were plenty of games in the Olde Days that were brilliant but are largely forgotten because they weren’t “big name” titles. I was worried that Level 9’s games were amongst them until I saw the Interactive Fiction archive, because they so rarely get mentioned and most times I’ve mentioned them to people I get this blank stare.
I’d love to discuss games that simply don’t fit into the usual mould. Hey Ley Games was a tiny (one-man) company that wrote games for the BBC and Archimedes for a few years, but even Google can’t find any reference to them. Another game that is “rare” is “The Pen and The Dark”, although a (very few) places document it. By Keith Devlin (author of C&VG’s adventure column at the time), it is a nice piece of deductive interactive fiction.
For any classic IF without backing of some huge company/author, I wholeheartedly CASA. It has got info on The Pen and the Dark as well as listings of the Heyley Games. Since some of the latter don’t have solutions listed yet, I’m sure if you’re up for it, all you’ll have to do is ask in their forums and you’ll find some other people to play these games ‘with’ you. It’s quite common there to start such ‘play-alongs’.