Interactive Fiction Top 50
In 2011 and 2015, I organised a vote for the Interactive Fiction Top 50. For the 2011 edition, the forum thread is found here and the results here and here. For the 2015 edition, the forum thread is here, and the results are here and here.
Now another four years have come and gone, so it is time for a new vote. That’s where you come in. It doesn’t matter whether you have played every interactive fiction game ever made, or have just started exploring the medium. It also doesn’t matter whether you prefer parser games, or choice-based games, or love both equally. As long as there is some IF that you like and would like the world to know about, you are a worthy participant. (For a little more on which games are eligible for inclusion, see below.)
The aim is not to decide what the best IF ever is by majority vote – that would be foolish. Rather, the aims of the top 50 are:
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To create a good opportunity for people to think about the best games they have played, and discuss their ideas on this topic with others.
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To allow people to be inspired by what they see on other people’s lists.
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To create a useful list of great games at which you can point newcomers to the IF scene.
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To track how the taste of the community evolves over time.
To participate, all you have to do is send me a list of between 1 and 20 interactive fiction games that you consider to be the best IF that you have played. You can send this list to me in private, but it is much more fun and much more useful to all of us if you make it public, for instance in this very topic, as a Recommended List on the IFDB, on your blog, or on Twitter. It is even more fun and even more useful if you explain what you loved about each entry in a few sentences. For examples, check out the forum threads linked to above.
To ensure that your votes are counted, either post the list in the IF Forum topic (which I will monitor) or send a list or link to me by mail. My mail address is myfirstname@lilith.cc, where you replace “myfirstname” with my first name. Which is Victor. The deadline is 31 July 2019.
Here are the rules:
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You can list between 1 and 20 games.
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The order in which you list the games is not important. The total number of points a work receives is simply the total number of votes it gets.
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You can list each work only once.
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You can list multiple works by one author.
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You can list your own works, if you really want to.
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It’s up to you to decide whether a work counts as interactive fiction. Anything that is listed on the IFDB is automatically fine; if one of the games you want to vote for is not listed there, feel free and indeed encouraged to add it to the site.
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You can vote for commercial works. You can vote for works that were written in any language.
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I’m asking you to identify the best interactive fiction, not the most influential, most important, most innovative or most accessible interactive fiction. But of course, if you believe that influence, importance, innovation or accessibility are important parts of being good, that is fine. For your list, you decide what counts as ‘best’.
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Please don’t go around canvassing for votes.
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As stated above, the deadline for entering your list is 31 July 2019.
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The organiser is allowed to participate –- because, hey, where’s the fun if I can’t give you my own list?
I hope to see many of you participate! Please spread the news wherever you see fit.
but I think Infocom won the hearts and minds war by getting in early and being prolific (and good, of course). Level 9 had their own interpreter that let them port things cross-platform easily, which potentially should have worked for them the same way it did for Infocom. It didn’t seem to here, though. I’m speaking from the Australian experience at the time I was a kid, which I think is similar to the USA’s in the 8-bit era (Apple II dominance) then overlaps more with the UK experience when we get to the 16-bit era (the Amiga was big here, less so the Atari ST). I saw reviews of Level 9 games in UK computer magazines, and I remember a rave review of Jewels of Darkness, but I didn’t see the games much on the shelves here that I remember. So I can only say, for Australians, I think a minority got into Level 9 in the day for various logistical reasons.
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