My first true love of the computer universe was Infocom. This company made Adventure games, more specifically, Text Adventure games. These were games that were both fun and mondo annoying. They were fun as they were often funny and zany and they had all kinds of off the wall references. They were annoying as you could never be sure exactly what the game writers wanted you to type into the text line. They were also a bit more challenging than modern games-as there was no Universal Hint System to sneak a peek or grab an instant solution to a tough problem.
Text adventures had a limited future, once graphics became good enough. Myst and The 7th Guest were the start of the Floating Hand adventure game. These a big let down from the free-for-all of text adventure games where you could type in anything you could think of. Floating hand games only allowed you to interact with certain parts of the screen, so it not possible to wander too far from the direction the game designs created for you. It seemed possible to become really lost in a number of Infocom games and there were often more than one way to end the game.
I really loved the Myst games as they had that kind of post apocalypse feel to them and who doesn’t want to roam a world all to themselves? Well, I guess a lot of people. The next big thing I recall in Adventure Games was interactive characters. But these are still a bit disappointing in floating hand games, you don’t get to say anything you want to say, you just click on a list of choices and work your way through all of them. A couple of my favorite games were the King’s Quest series and the Gabriel Knight series.
More recently I have liked a lot of games from The Adventure Company, the Sherlock Holmes games have been pretty good and the Siberia games were just great. Just finished up Dracula 3, which had a pretty lame ending, but was otherwise pretty good. A few too many puzzles worked on the theory that you knew a good deal of math and that you had a semi-photographic memory.
My favorite Adventure Game writers are Steve Meretzky, Roberta Williams, and Jane Jensen. Sadly Jane Jensen is the only one who still seems to be working. If Steve or Roberta happen to read this, I would still buy you games.
My god I love the adventure genre! I was introduced to them via the ‘floating hand’ fleet of games – I most fondly remember those produced by Kemco-Seika, games like “Shadowgate”, “the Uninvited”, & “Deja Vu”. Being a small illogical child I did not see that those games were not very good – there was no rhyme or reason to them, you just fumbled through best you could combining random parts of your invenory with random parts of your environment til something clicked. I liked them though because they required a more methodical & thoughtful approach than the shoot em up games my brothers were intimidatingly good at, leaving me in the dust as I tried to keep up with the frenetic 16-bit chaos.
Infocom was great! My favourite?: “A Mind Forever Voyaging”….so atmospheric!
Even though text-based games are, technologically speaking, a thing of the past, there are still plenty classics available online as abandonware. There’s some still being made, too. I have to admit I have a huge soft spot for ‘interactive fiction’ despite the flashier game options available these days. People around me look over at my screen of dense text and make disapproving sounds when I explain it’s a game I’m playing (a trade off is sometimes I’m messing around with an IF game but it looks like I’ve been busy writing…all that text!)
My favorite Infocom game was Planet Fall, a wonderfully unforgiving game that saw you killed at every opportunity and had puzzles that couldn’t be solved if you hadn’t died at least a couple of times. And it was funny. So was Leather Goddess of Phobos.
My all time favorite really bad looking game was Castle Quest, in which a character set graphic hero fought character set graphic rats, blobs, and giants. That was a fun game that was both difficult and a ton of fun. The recent Fate games are pretty much updated versions of Castle Quest.
I have to smile each time I see JJ Abrams wearing an Infocom t-shirt and wonder if his young fans get the reference.