Hack65.Play the Best: Infocom Adventures

Hack 65. Play the Best: Infocom Adventures

Collect and discover the cream of the crop of text games .

In the beginning, there was Adventure.

Widely accepted as the first text adventure game, Adventure (a.k.a. Colossal Cave) was written around 1975 by Will Crowther, programmer and spelunker. The game was very rudimentary, based on a map of a real-world cave system, but with certain elements of puzzle solving and treasure collection. The following year, the game was expanded extensively by Don Woods, and spread like wildfire across ARPAnet.

Among the people who quickly became fans of the game were Dave Lebling, Marc Blank, and Tim Anderson at MIT, who decided to set out to write a better game that drew on the same ideas. Along with Bruce Daniels, a fellow student, they completed the game over the next couple of years , eventually ending up with the first version of what is now known as Zork, the first Infocom title.

The original plan had been to simply call it a day once the game was complete, but a group from the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science decided that they wanted to set up a company together. With no plan for what to sell, they settled on the Zork game as their first product. It was also at this time that one of the greatest ideas of Infocom came into existence; in order to allow Zork to run across the range of home computers that were becoming available, they created the Z- Machine , a virtual machine that could be emulated across a range of hardware platforms, allowing a single version of the game to be produced and made available with the interpreter for each platform. It was this visionary step that allowed the game to be rapidly ported from PDP-11 to TRS-80 and Apple II, and that makes it possible to play the games on modern hardware.

Infocom went on to develop and publish some of the greatest and most groundbreaking pieces of interactive fiction ever made over the next few years, including two Zork sequels, Enchanter, Deadline (a mystery title), and the videogame version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (in collaboration with author Douglas Adams).

It was in the mid-80s, however, that things started to turn sour. Although Infocom was still turning out some of the best interactive fiction available, much of the profits were pumped into a new piece of business software, a database called Cornerstone. At the same time, new generations of computer hardware were allowing graphical games to take over, a fact that Infocom never really seemed to come to terms with. As Cornerstone sank without a trace, Infocom was eventually sold to Activision, who hold the rights to their games to this day.

Activision pushed the company in what appeared to be more palatable directions to the modern gamer, introducing graphical interfaces in titles such as Beyond Zork and Zork Zero. But the time of the text adventure's popularity was drawing to an end, and despite producing consistently high quality games, commercial success slipped away. By 1989, the company's original staff had been decimated, and Infocom's time as the greatest purveyor of interactive fiction was over.

6.4.1. What Made Them Great

The caretaker at the school I went to once said something that seemed strange at the time. "I prefer radio to television," he said, "because the pictures are better." That contradiction lies at the heart of one of the main reasons for Infocom's success. The quality of writing in their games was consistently high, at a time when much of their competition in the text adventure field was limited to terse, single- sentence descriptions of locations. Take this example from the game Trinity:

The temperature on this tiny platform is well below freezing. But it isn't just the cold that makes your teeth chatter when you look down that narrow stairway, thousands of feet high.

Far below, the shadow of the structure stretches across the landscape. From this great altitude it looks like a dark finger, accusing a point on the east horizon.

The world that the player could imagine from the descriptions provided by the games was certainly more impressive than anything that computers of the time could display, and arguably still is, giving the lie to the old saying that a picture is worth a thousand wordsroughly the number of distinct words in an average Infocom game, as it happens.

But it wasn't just the descriptions that made Infocom's games so good. The consistency of the worlds also set them above a lot of the competition. Ironically for a genre that had sprung from the map of a real-world location, a lot of early text adventures had very arbitrary maps that felt like a series of randomly selected rooms stuck together haphazardly. Not so Infocom titles; everything fitted together in a way that made sense within the context of the game setting, and a map of the game always made sense in a way that was not always the case for other titles in the genre . In fact a number of Infocom games came with convincing maps of the places they were set, which provided a useful tool for navigation within the game.

Within these worlds the puzzlesthe meat of most interactive fictionwere also well thought out and integrated into the world. It's a lesson that a lot of game designers could learn from today, in their game worlds brimming over with color -and symbol-coded keys that must make it next to impossible for the villains to get around their homes . Where the path was blocked, it was normally in a more imaginative fashion, from the poodle yapping at the heels of your mailman in Wishbringer to the outright refusal of the game to allow you into the drive room in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Puzzles in Infocom games were often considerably more complex than in other games of the time. Certainly they had their fair share of tasks that involved bringing an object to a location to gain passage, but there was so much more to some of the puzzles, from the time travel in Sorcerer which allows you to help yourself solve a puzzle to the interaction required by different specialist robots to accomplish tasks in Suspended, one of Infocom's quirkiest titles. A particular highlight of some games was the ability to solve the same puzzle in different ways: where there were multiple logical approaches to the same problem, often more than one of them would work. And even in those cases where they wouldn't, the games would sometimes acknowledge your ingenuity with a suitable response.

Puzzles, of course, couldn't be completed without a way of interacting with the game, and it was this interaction that was sometimes the worst enemy of the player in text adventures. Many games, including Adventure, had parsers that were limited to simple two-word instructions, and guessing the exact phrase required to carry out a particular action was often more infuriating than solving the puzzle itself. Infocom's parser was much more carefully crafted, and accepted input such as GET EVERYTHING EXCEPT THE RED KEY or PICK UP THE ZORKMID. BITE IT THEN PUT IT IN THE SMALL BOX . The ability of the games to understand more naturally phrased instructions made it far easier to concentrate on the task at hand, and removed another barrier between the player and the game world.

6.4.2. Packaging

One of the things that made Infocom's games so distinctive was their packaging, which often included a range of objects related to the game in some way, sometimes providing required information to solve the game, sometimes just adding atmosphere. It was yet another way of immersing the player further into the game, and often provided a form of copy protection as a handy side effect, as information found in the props would often turn out to be vital in completing the game.

The interesting pack-ins started with the mystery game Deadline, partly as a result of the input of Infocom's new advertising agency, and partly as a way to work around the space limitations of the game by taking essential background information and supplying it as hardcopy rather than within the text of the game itself.

Some of the more extravagant items are hard to come by in good condition these days. The mask that shipped with Suspended, for example, can add greatly to the value of the game. A few of the other interesting items you might come across in original Infocom games include:

• A scratch and sniff card in Leather Goddesses of Phobos, which gives off suitable aromas at various points in the game.

• A circus balloon in Ballyhooanother tricky item to find intact.

• A matchbook (complete with scrawled phone number) in The Witness.

• A calendar celebrating the life and times of the Flathead dynasty in Zork Zero.

6.4.3. Buying Infocom Games

Unfortunately, laying your hands on Infocom games has become increasingly difficult of late. The rights to the games are currently held by Activision, which is not currently selling them in any form. They did release the first three Zork titles as freeware, but the software they released only runs on Windows 95 and above. You can download the games at the ( unofficial ) Infocom home page (http://www.csd.uwo.ca/Infocom/).

Fortunately for the eager collector, Activision also released a number of compilations which can provide a good way of building up a collection quickly. The first of these are the two Lost Treasures of Infocom collections. Volume one contains twenty games, including the five Zork titles, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and the Enchanter trilogy. Volume two contains eleven of the remaining titles, most notably Trinity, Bureaucracy, Nord and Bert, and A Mind Forever Voyaging. These two compilations come in sturdy cardboard boxes with a nicely printed instruction manual containing copies of all of the important contents from the original release. Later, The Masterpieces of Infocom was released, a single CD containing 33 Infocom games with documentation provided on the disc in PDF format.

The bad news is that none of the games are commercially available any more, and that you need to make sure you have the right documentation from the original set (or the duplicates from the Activision compilations) to play the games through to completion. But there's some good news too.

The good news is that because of the nature of Infocom's games, the platform for which you get the games is not all that important. Provided you have some way of reading the discs, you should be able to convert the data into a format suitable for running on your machine of choice. The Interactive Fiction Archive at http://www.ifarchive.org has converters for Apple II, Atari and C64 versions of the games, and the data files needed to run the games are openly available from the disc on most other platforms. You can also find interpreter software for your platform of choice, from Gameboy Advance to Windows XP, at the archive site.

The best way to hunt down Infocom games these days is probably online. eBay is an obvious first port of call. A simple search for Infocom should turn up most of the matches, but don't forget to search for individual games by name as well. As always with eBay, the harder the listing is to find, the more likely you are to pick up a bargain.

You'll also find a number of Infocom fan sites online, some of which have trade or for sale sections. You're less likely to find real bargains that way, but if you want to be sure of what you're getting it's a good way to go.

6.4.4. The Games

Here are brief descriptions of a few of the best games that Infocom produced. Although virtually any Infocom game is a worthwhile purchase, these are among the ones that stand out as the best of the best.

6.4.4.1. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

The babelfish vending machine from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is probably the most famous puzzle in the history of interactive fiction, and deservedly so. Even people who have never played a text-based game in anger have heard of it. One vending machine, one dressing gown, and a miscellany of items grabbed from Arthur Dent's now-demolished home on his now-demolished planet, and all you need to do is get a fish out of the vending machine and into your ear. It's actually not that complex a puzzle, but it'll have most people tearing their hair out in frustration, while at the same time realizing that the fault is theirs, not the game'sthe highest praise that a puzzle can receive.

This is almost certainly one of Infocom's highest points, and the people behind it are a big part of that. Steve Meretzky, one of Infocom's most prolific developers, and Douglas Adams, the author of the original radio play and book worked together on this one, and it shows in the quality of the writing, the understated humor, the ingenious and appropriate puzzles, and the all-round feeling of craftsmanship to the title.

There's also a certain level of defiance of convention to the game. At one point it will refuse to allow you to carry out a relatively innocuous action, then deliberately lie to you about the contents of a room. At another, a typo or misunderstood sentence will take on real significance for the inhabitants of another galaxy. To play the game online, head over to http://www.douglasadams.com/creations/infocomjava.html. All you'll need is a browser with Java support.

It says something about the quality of this game that over two decades after its original release, the BBC are using a graphically updated version of the game to promote the new Hitchhiker's Guide radio series. At the time of writing it is still available on the BBC web site and provides a great way of getting into one of Infocom's best titles for free.

The original packaging included a Don't Panic button, destruction orders for your home and planet, a microscopic space fleet , some fluff (the true significance of which is only made clear upon playing the game), and a pair of peril-sensitive sunglasses. Oh, and no tea. None of these contents are required to play the game through to completion.

6.4.4.2. Trinity.

Trinity, by Brian Moriarty, is widely seen as one of the highlights of Infocom's output. It starts out in what appears to be the real world, but as World War III breaks out you are transported into a strange fantasy world faintly reminiscent of a darker version of Wonderland. If you can make sense of this strange new world then perhaps you can do something about the impending nuclear catastrophe.

Along with some of the best writing that Infocom had to offer, the game has a lot of extra comments for people who can recognize the references to places and people real and fictional scattered throughout the game.

There are some wonderfully twisted puzzles to solve, including a remarkable piece of coding that allows you to switch the whole world around to a mirror image of itself, including the map, by navigating a Klein bottle . And what other game allows you to attempt to pay Charon (the ferryman of the Styx) with a credit card rather than the customary silver coin?

Along with the game, the box contained a comic about the history of the atomic bomb, a map of the Trinity site, a fold-out sundial, and instructions for making an origami crane . There are important clues to be found in the comic book.

6.4.4.3. Planetfall.

Planetfall was most notable for containing one of the most endearing and well-realized non-player characters (NPC) in text adventures. Floyd the robot was brought alive through cunning coding and great characterization. He reacted to your actions and the environment, and you ended up feeling guilty if you ever turned him off, and genuine emotion when he showed his truly heroic nature later in the game. It says a lot about the appeal of Floyd that Stationfall, the sequel to Planetfall, was billed as the return of Floyd, rather than of your character. And deservedly so.

It's not all about Floyd, though. The way in which you're thrown into the game's setting with very little knowledge of what's going on, and slowly build up a realization of what your goal is as you discover more of the background to the facility you find yourself in, is masterfully implemented. You're never led by the hand, but there's always something to point you in the right directioneven if you don't work it out in a single play-through, you can get a better sense of the world for your next attempt.

In the packaging you'll find a Stellar Patrol recruitment leaflet, a Stellar Patrol ID card, three postcards from a range of scenic planets, and some extracts from your diary. None of this is vital to completing the game.

6.4.4.4. A Mind Forever Voyaging.

One of the features of Infocom games that makes them so appealing is the desire of the authors to push back the boundaries of the interactive fiction genre, to try something entirely new. Steve Meretzky's A Mind Forever Voyaging is one of the better examples of this. Set in a research lab in the near future, you play the part of a computer running simulation software for a social engineering plan in the final stages of evaluation. As a computer, you have no physical presence in the world, just access to a small number of communication nodes from which you can observe and communicate with the outside world, and a number of programs you can access and give simple commands. Enter the simulation, and you get to play the part of a citizen in the world governed by the Plan, exploring a simulated city of the future, first directed by the scientists at the facility, later by your own curiosity .

The most noteworthy point about the game from a pure gaming point of view is that this is a text adventure with maybe two puzzles in the whole game, neither of which is more than a couple of simple actions. Because in this case it's not about solving puzzlesit's about the social commentary provided by the ongoing simulations and the political responses to your discoveries.

It's a more short-lived experience than a lot of Infocom titles: you'll inevitably make your way through the majority of the game without anything to hold you back. But it's well worth seeking out as one of the better examples of a title that genuinely lives up to the title interactive fiction .

As always, the packaging for this game was lavish, with a color map of the city in which the game is set, a copy of "Dakota Online" magazine, and a pen. Above all, however, you'll need to make sure that if you're buying this title it comes with the decoder ring that was part of the original package. Without it you'll never be able to enter the simulation that makes up the majority of the game.

6.4.5. Other Highlights

Selecting a handful of Infocom games to recommend is always difficult, because a lot of worthy titles will always fall by the wayside. A few of the other great games that I can't let pass without at least a brief mention:

• Suspended is another title that tries to do something very different, with the user 's interaction with the world taking place through six very specialized robots, each with their own sensors and capabilities. It's definitely not a game for everyone, but it stands out from the crowd and pushes the genre in new directions.

• The Enchanter trilogy (Enchanter, Sorcerer, and Spellbreaker) are set in a fantasy world with an ingenious set of magical spells for you to learn and use. The interaction between these spells can lead to some intriguing puzzles. The later games in the trilogy are among the most difficult titles Infocom produced, with some complex but extremely satisfying problems to solve.

• Leather Goddesses of Phobos is a humorous and slightly risqu pulp space opera adventure, which offers a series of lewdness settings (though at the end of the day all of them are comparatively civilized). The game features some great pulp writing and settings, as well as the odd addition of interactive smell, with various points in the game prompting you to use the scratch and sniff card shipped with the game.

• Nord and Bert Couldn't Make Head or Tail of It is another quirky title that throws the player into a series of short mini-adventures, each of which is based around a different style of wordplay, from spoonerisms to trite sayings. The traditionally solid Infocom parser is taken to a new level in this game, as it has to recognize the topics of the different adventures along with common variations.

Adrian Jackson