Oh yes, by at least five years. My first exposure was, I think, around end of 1982, when I came across a book titled Over the Spectrum by Melbourne House, which had a listing named Adventure at the end. The book was nothing to call home about, but that game intrigued me, and I found the concept magical enough to get hooked instantly.
The listings were not attributed, but I have always suspected the author of the game and of much of that book’s content was William Tang (of Beam Software), just based on the style of the code.
I knew nothing about previous adventures then, and in fact only learnt about, and came into contact with Dungeon and Advent years later, once I had access to my high school’s computer. Zork had been existing for ten years then, but I was ignorant about that as well. They were a completely different scale of difficulty and that changed my perspective on the genre: these were proper challenges, nothing to do with the puny, tape-based games for the cheap 8-bit micros that had been prevalent in Europe in the first half of the decade.
Because there was no other choice than to beat them or to give up. There was no help easily available (to me at least). And one could get very bored.
I have always liked it, but it’s different in tone. It’s not light-hearted or whimsical, but melancholic and maybe even a little sad. It does use comedy, but more as a dissociative device to emphasize the estrangement of the PC from the world they are exploring. It is atmospheric and conveys a certain undertone of nostalgia for a time that, as it often happens, never existed. It is technically an investigation game, with the mystery automatically being untangled as puzzles are solved, instead of having to depend on the player’s inference.
Most people seem to find the setting uninspired and bland. I disagree. The game dips into the themes of decay and loss in small communities that are prevalent in classic American literature, and you need to be attuned to these. It has a lot in common, thematically, with Kentucky Route Zero, but lacks the artistic sophistication of the latter. It’s more an ambience game than a puzzle fest, and a clear tonal outlier in the Infocom catalogue.
Your mileage may vary a lot. You should check @Rovarsson’s review of the game in this topic as well. He has a different take on it than I have, although he clearly liked it too, maybe for different reasons. I find it interesting because that write-up reads like a completely different game, but no, we are talking about the same one.