The third in the Questprobe series was The Fantastic Four, Part 1: Human Torch and The Thing. This was one of the first games (if not the first game) where you could play as either of two protagonists. This lead to some very interesting puzzles. It’s probably for this reason, that I remember it better than The Hulk and Spider-man, apart from that initial “puzzle” in The Hulk. It must have taken me a good half hour to an hour to work that one out. In the last year or so, I found out that there is another solution.
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Yeah, definitely an early example of a still, uncommon sub-genre… another “big name” from 1985 was The Lord of the Rings: Game One which also had multiple-playable characters.
Oldorf’s Revenge and The Tarturian played around with the concept earlier in 1980, but they were doing so in more of an “RPG party” sort of sense, I think. Adventure International’s own The Labyrinth of Crete, from 1983, was probably one of the very earliest “true” multi-protagonist text adventures.
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It’s kind of amazing to me that people remember this: I have no idea. I know I got very into the Discworld MUD at some point in the mid-90s, and its parser really spoiled me for the much simpler ones that IF games have. But I’m pretty sure I’d run into Adventure before that, and at least a couple games on a friend’s Apple II (hmm, and maybe Hampton Manor?) and been fairly unimpressed… I definitely played some of the explosion of hobbyist works experimenting with all kinds of things when I was in college from 1998-2001, and found them interesting, but skimming rec.arts.interactive-fiction had some interesting ideas but was also just…no thanks. And I’ve played stuff off-and-on since then. But the first one? No idea.
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I just had to play it through yesterday! To my surprise, I remembered most of the puzzles although it’s been almost 40 years since I last played it. Yeah, it was a very fair game, and there was a consistency to the game that struck me as very thematically correct (at least compared to some other games from the same era that start with a Z). I especially appreciated the suspense created by the final countdown when the bomb is just about to explode and you are racing against time to get the final moves completed… It also struck me that this must be one of the first popular adventure games that were not treasure hunts but actually had a bit of a plot to them.
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Lovely to hear it was translated into Spanish! I read - and still have - the original British INPUT issues. I adored the text adventure sections.
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Greetings everyone! 
My first experience with interactive fiction was sometime in the late 70s or early 80s. I forget the exact year. Actually I’d guesstimate I was somewhere between 10-12 so maybe 1978 - 1980?
My best friend as a little kid was a girl down the street whose parents worked for Digital Equipment Corporation. They had a VT100 in their house which her father had set up to let her login to the games account.
They let me play ADVENT for about 5 minutes, and it was like my brain was ON FIRE with the possibilities!
The first IF game of my own was Scott Adams Adventureland on Cassette for my Atari 400 in 1980. Totally worth every minute it toook to load!
I remember being entranced by the beautiful cursive font the text was rendered in, it really added to the flavor!
But the game that really kindled my life long love of IF was. Stork. I had pages and pages of notes, maps for the maze, you name it!
Info on are IF legends for a reason!
Thanks for starting this thread!
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Stork? Don’t you mean Zork?
Now I’ve got an adventure game in my head where you play a stork and have to sort out a mixed up delivery of baby animals, getting them back to the correct families.
Edit: Actually that does, now I think about it, sound vaguely familiar as a concept… I’m guessing it was probably done as a ZX Spectrum text adventure at one point.
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And a thieving crow who randomly steals babies and drops them with a dwarven family.
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Autocorrect strikes again, methinks.
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You’re all just too embarrassed to admit you haven’t played Stork.
-Wade
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You’re quite right of course! I was flat on my back at the time and unable to use my laptop. I was dictating with my iPhone which I suppose was a rookie error. I’d checked for typos but missed that one.
Apologies and thanks for the report. I can’t seem to edit at this point so my goof is consigned to history
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I always thought adventure games were cool as a kid, but I never played many of them. I just didn’t know where you could, or if they were still being made.
I remember coming across Nord and Bert on Wikipedia while reading about wordplay. I thought it sounded like a really fun game, but again, I wasn’t sure how you could play it.
In July 2021, someone I knew online published a now-mostly-defunct archive for playing text adventures; all the tools are there, you just need to click one and play it. I got it, tried out a few starter games but didn’t get that far. Then I wondered: do they have Nord and Bert? And they did! I played it and had a lot of fun with the start of the game. The rest, not so much. Either way, it’s the first IF I played to completion. I picked a few more weird games to start with (ASCII AND THE ARGONAUTS, Savoir-Faire, Max Blaster and Doris de Lightning Against the Parrot Creatures of Venus), but I liked all of them.
Around that time, I started visiting IFDB and this forum. It took me a few months to join them, but I’ve found the community friendly and welcoming overall. Very happy with how this all came together!
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I’m not good at remembering my childhood, but the first IF-like game I remember playing was probably Conflict: Middle East Political Simulator, which I might have discovered via Home of the Underdogs. I’m not sure if this totally counts as IF, since there are graphics, but it’s basically an interface to a spreadsheet. This was when I was 15 or 16, and I used dosbox on windows. If this doesn’t count, then it would probably be a visual novel, maybe Digital: A Love Story (which I played at around a similar age). I was into VNs before I got into text-only games.
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I love Conflict! I played it on my cousins’ computer about 1991, then copied it from them and played it at home. I still fire it up on DOSBox from time to time. I can’t explain why it’s so addictive.
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Mine was Cow V: The Great Egg Quest, a somewhat pointless little text adventure that I didn’t even understand at first due to not knowing English well enough.
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Since someone has resurrected this thread!
I’m not one hundred percent certain that it was the very first IF game I ever played, but the one that made the biggest impression on me as a teenager was Scott Adams’s The Count. It’s my favourite of Scott’s games and I think it still stands up today as an excellent piece of game design. It’s not a game that can be completed on the very first play through, in fact it can be considered an optimisation puzzle. The game has a system of days and nights; some actions can only be undertaken at night and some only during the day, and you can only survive a handful of nights in Count Dracula’s castle. Completing it requires planning and a lot of learning by failure, but beating it was an incredibly satisfying experience.
One of the things I love about The Count and Scott Adams’s games generally is the economy of them. Among the very first earliest commercial computer games, they had to fit into just a few kilobytes of space. Not a single byte was wasted. The maps are small, with no empty locations. There is something to do in every room. Objects often have more than one use. The fact that I encountered these games first, long before I discovered Infocom, Level 9, Magnetic Scrolls et al, had a profound effect on my own approach to game design. My puzzles, like Scott’s, are mostly of the medium-sized dry goods variety. They’re about McGyvering your way out of situations with whatever you have to hand. There are no abstract puzzles; no towers of Hanoi, chess problems, acrostics or anything involving baseball diamonds in my games, because there weren’t any in Scott’s. Despite having the luxury of practically limitless memory I still prefer a small, compact map with something important to do in nearly every location. The day / night cycles in The Count and Ghost Town and the tidal systems in Pirate Adventure and Savage Island got me thinking about the game world as a living, evolving environment rather than a passive backdrop against which to set my stories. My games tend to be focused on NPCs whereas Scott’s aren’t, for purely practical reasons, and yet the titular character is a very palpable presence in The Count despite only ever being implied. It’s all smoke and mirrors, and it works beautifully to create a genuine sense of menace. Scott’s games can be tough and unforgiving but they’re incredibly clever, and I still go back to them for inspiration to this day.
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Bravo. Very well said.
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Pirate Adventure is a glaring exception to this.
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Even Pirate Island Adventure is quite dense, especially compared to other text adventure offerings from the same era.
Only the white rooms have nothing to do in them except passing through, and 4 of them are maze rooms anyway.
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