From Infocom to 80 Days: An oral history of text games and interactive fiction | Hacker News Reader

From Infocom to 80 Days: An oral history of text games and interactive fiction

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206 pointspseudolus74 comments

It’s barely mentioned aside from the title, but I just wanted to say that 80 Days is a really wonderful game that is well worth your time if you’re into text-based games.

It’s more of an interactive story than a puzzle game, with some light resource management elements. But the writing is wonderful and there are hundreds of possible paths and storylines to discover. Its replayability is very high, whether you’re trying to find the fastest route, seeking out the most remote locations or unlocking hidden subplots.

It really does well to invoke the spirit of adventure in travel, and it was a particular delight during the pandemic days when that wasn’t possible.

Plus they’ve open sourced the language and tools used to create the branching narrative!

https://www.inklestudios.com/ink/

That's not a text adventure though? Or is the interface text? It's hard to tell from the screenshots and I'm on my phone right now :)

The graphics are mostly for atmosphere, the main focus is paragraphs of prose that describe the story and what happens to the main characters. Instead of a parser, you tap to choose one of several choices at each decision point, and you can also decide which routes to take on the main map. Aside from that, you can buy and sell items to make money.

Your choices depend on where you are, of course, but can also be affected by your money, items in your inventory, and past decisions. So, for example, if you help an inventor in Prague, he may give you a device that you can use later in Delhi.

EDIT: Here's an example of the text scenes and how you choose options:

https://youtu.be/oCKQVR9odHs?si=URPO8TngeM6_Jc83&t=242

I haven't played this one through, but I think it's an extension of the work they did on "Sourcery", which was an adaptation of the old "choose your own adventure" books to digital. For that one, they kept the book's story structure, added static images, a map, and a dice-rolling mechanic for combat.

So the base story mechanic is multiple choice, with some state (inventory, flags, stats) based on the game play. It's kind of between a text adventure and a novel.

To me it feels like they're exploring a new portion of the interactive fiction space, and it's interesting to watch where they take it.

It's 95% text, the rest is for flavor.

It's a choose your own adventure. It's got some neat graphics, but they're just decorative. You don't interact with them. There would be nothing different about the game if they were stripped out and you played the game through an 80-column command line.

The graphics are mostly 'functional', I wouldn't even go as far as calling them 'neat'.

There's basically only two kinds of graphics in the game: a world map and the icon for the items you can buy and sell. (Unless they changed the game, I haven't played in more than a year.)

It's a great game!

You might also like the spiritual sequel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overboard!_(2021_video_game)

It's been years since I played it, but I remember there being some fairly intricate vector illustrations in certain locations. A vague memory of some sort of giant land-walking robot you rode for a while. It may have had some animation, or that might just be my imagination.

Oh, you have some portraits of people, and pictures for the cities / locations. I think the robot might have been part of the latter?

I guess I should play it again one of these days!

> It's hard to tell from the screenshots and I'm on my phone right now [...]

Btw, it works great on mobile. (Or at least on an iPad.)

Oh yeah but I'll never be interested in portable gaming. I tried it during the years. Arcade handhelds in the 80s, I had a PSP, I played games on my first gen iPhone. But always I ended up dropping it soon after. Similar to many other experiences, I'll never do serious work on a phone. It's really a secondary device for me. I'm not a mobile-first kind of person.

Working on a mobile feels like I'm reading the newspaper through the core of a toilet roll while trying to write a summary with a pen in my mouth. Whereas my 24" workstation is so productive and comfortable <3

Mobile works for some games (for me).

Eg playing something like 2d Mario on a GameBoy or the Switch works. 80 Days on the iPad works.

I wouldn't really want to play something like Alpha Centauri on a mobile device or a couch-sitting console.

80 Days is perfect. take your favorite artist recording 400 songs and you only get to listen to 40 of them and you just want more

Meg Jayanth++

Choose Your Own Adventure++

...and a little telemetry back to the mother ship. (annoying)

The ink language mentioned in the article, created by Inkle studios for their games, is a joy to work with. It is designed to be embedded and makes writing branching dialog or complete stories very easy.

As well as 80 Days, I really liked Inkle's implementation of the old Steve Jackson Sorcery books (for iOS and other platforms). They really know how to polish their games.

Voyage of the Marigold[0] is a project I recently completed written in a mixture of ink and js for a the 2024 Spring Thing[1] Festival of Interactive Fiction. It didn't win a major prizes but I am happy with the way it turned out.

[0] https://sheep.horse/voyage_of_the_marigold/

(Your enjoyment will probably be proportional to how much you like Star Trek)

[1] https://www.springthing.net/2024/play.html

(I recommend Rescue At Quickenheath, another game that didn't win a major prize but was my favorite)

I loved the recent newsletter-turned-book '50 Years of Text Games' by Aaron Reed. It's a bunch of deep dives into a bunch of games from throughout history, most of which I hadn't heard of.

https://aareed.itch.io/50-years-of-text-games

Yes! I was a backer for this while it was still running. Really cool series, don't have a physical copy of the book but do intend to get at least a digital copy at some point. Man that hard copy would make a GREAT coffee table book though...

I'm very familiar with the Infocom era and am still in touch with some of the folks. I admit I haven't kept up with the latest developments. Probably should take a look.

For folks interested in the early history, Jason Scott's Get Lamp documentary is highly recommended. (He also has an Infocom-focused edit.)

The latest developments in IF are pretty amazing compared to the Infocom days. The parsers are a lot more advanced and this was all before things like LLMs, which I assume could be used in some way here.

I can imagine. While sophisticated for the time, the Infocom parsers were often sort of an exercise in figuring out the right incantation. (Sort of like Alexa :-/ Low blow I know.) Especially with LLMs and voice recognition, there's a huge amount of potential present and future for a lot more fluid interactions. Not that I expect it to ever be a really mainstream genre.

I dunno, I think it could with the right evolution in the interface. Imagine an interactive story app that you listen to on your commute, where voice commands back to it are the only interface (eg so it’s safe to interact with while driving).

Maybe that’s just a subset of the more general “AI companion” opportunity, but I expect you could get some really interesting experiences by calibrating the balance between the manually curated/composed parts of it and the parts that get a bit more painted-in by the LLM.

Am thinking especially of stories with conflicting timelines, unreliable narrators, etc, where you’d maybe be revisiting the same events from multiple perspectives to piece together what actually happened.

How has nobody in these comments mentioned IFDB yet? https://ifdb.org

You can play almost the whole history from your browser if you want.

I am #20071 on ifMUD.

I had also written a document called "Tricky Document" which describes several tricks involved with Z-machine programming (many of which Infocom did not use). http://zzo38computer.org/zmachine/doc/tricky.txt (I also wrote implementations of Z-machine in C, PostScript, JavaScript, and Glulx.)

Another text adventure system that I know of is "OASYS". The VM code was not documented, although it did include source code, and I have figured it out from the source code and written a document. The included OAC compiler was rather limited (no include files, you could not call a function that is defined later in the file, ambiguous syntax, strings duplicated in the output file, no pointer types, no type checking, no macros, no arrays, no bitwise operations, spurious vocabulary entries, and various other limitations), so I had written my own compiler (which still uses the same VM code, but with an entirely different syntax).

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy shown in the photo in the article is actually the very first piece of computer software I ever bought.

I remember purchasing it in a Babbages or something for $14 and being so excited.

Brought it home and ran it on a 286 with a monitor capable of displaying text in one color: amber

> insert babelfish into ear

It was also a great example of the 'feelies' that came with games back then - the peril sensitive sunglasses and little baggie of belly button lint. It helped bridge the virtual text world with a connection to the physical.

It's interesting that 9 year old me remembers opening the box like yesterday because of those items.

Likewise. I remember the Infocom ads: A photo of a brain and a statement that imagination was the best graphics anyone could get [1].

I never could finish the Hitchhiker's game though.

[1] https://www.atarimania.com/pgepub.awp?param=publisher-&value...

--> "We stick our graphics where the sun don't shine..."

The BBC released an online version for the 30th Anniversary of the Hitchhikers Guide with some additional graphics if anyone would like some nostalgia [1].

I don't know anyone who finished that game. It could be very frustrating. I was very pleased just to get the babel fish. Since then I have read the walk through and I doubt could have ever completed it without help. [2] (spoilers!)

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/1g84m0sXpnNCv84GpN...

[2] http://www.eristic.net/games/infocom/hhg.html

> A photo of a brain and a statement that imagination was the best graphics anyone could get [...]

Funny enough, that actually applied to computer graphics just as well. Have a look at eg the sprites of Super Maria Bros: there's so little detail, and your imagination fills in the rest.

(In twenty years, we can point at today's graphics and say the same, I guess. It's always easier to see with past works.)

we stick our graphics where the sun don't shine: https://web.archive.org/web/20150923005950/http://web.mit.ed...

we unleash the world's most powerful graphics technology: https://web.archive.org/web/20230117073114/http://web.mit.ed...

I never really played HHGG as a kid but started it up on my Apple //e using this wonderful disk image, which has a great front end for Infocom games, in case anyone hasn't seen it:

https://archive.org/details/PitchDark

For a history of IF between 1972–1999, see the Inform Designer's Manual Edition 4, Chapter 46.

https://www.inform-fiction.org/manual/html/s46.html

I still have the Infocom game Leather Goddesses of Phobos, complete with scratch and sniff card, and the 3-D (blue-red) glasses for the enclosed comic book. If you don't have VR or first-person, it was the next best thing: they told you when to scratch and sniff.

I still have a couple of Invisiclues hint books. I wonder if the special markers are still available and if they would still work on these old books.

There were a couple of standard "invisible inks." [0] I assume Invisiclues used one of them--most likely baking soda given they didn't use heat to reveal. No idea how stable either of those were as inks.

[0] https://www.chem.ox.ac.uk/files/secretstoppers1pdf

I think that Invisiclues is good idea, and that UHS format can be used as a computer file with a similar use. There are FOSS implementations of UHS such as OpenUHS and FreeUHS. Maybe someone will be able to rewrite the Invisiclues in UHS format. (I also wrote a UHS writer program in uxn. And, I had written UHS parser in PostScript; if you have printer with invisible ink (or scratch-off layer) then maybe it will be possible to use this PostScript code to make a program that will print out with invisible ink, too.)

It might be the same as the markers found in these "Yes & Know" books: https://www.amazon.com/Lee-Publications-Invisible-Know-8-88/...

i had that back in the 80s - managed to move something like n,s,w and then gave up, good name for a game though, and about typical for me and infocom.

I've never been great at working my way all the way through games. I think I may have completed that one--mostly because I could get hints from the author :-)

with zero prior knowledge other than its title, should one approach the sights and smells cautiously..?

Favourite part of this game: the untangling cream and the bonus joke about the rabbit.

Most hated part of this game: HOP, CLAP, KWEEPA.

Also funny how I recall this stuff vividly more than 3 decades later!

My first experience of IF was the tape-based Classic Adventure on the Amstrad CPC. My family bought the CPC late 1985, I bought Amstrad Action in December 1985 and saw the advert for it and new I wanted it more than all the other games that were reviewed with their flashy graphics and beeps and what-have-you.

that smell is: pizza!

This seems like a good spot to plug one of my favorite games

Will Not Let Me Go

https://ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2017/Will%...

A Twine game that simulates dementia. It's a brilliant, well written game that ironically will stick in your memory.

Seconded -- this game was really excellent and stuck with me longer than the games that placed better than it in 2017.

Loved text adventures since my CPC6128 days. They are about the only things I could still use my Psion 5 for. I have Lost Treasures 1 and 2, and the Classics on CD.

This is fantastic: http://www.getlamp.com/

You can also hunt down the Infocom Universe Bootleg. It has pretty much all the games, bonus games, invisiclues, IUB database, software tools.

IUB.zip is 397.5mb zipped

There is a love/hate relationship with most of those old text adventures. They could make an entire world with just a handful of words and fill them with clever puzzles to delight the users.

But then the parser would be willfully obtuse and most of the gameplay would be figuring out the exact combination of commands to unlock the next snippit of the story. Sometimes requiring the player to telepathically connect with the developer to figure out precisely what phrasing he intended.

    You see a special looking rock on the ground.

    > PICK UP THE ROCK

    Huh?

    > PICK UP ROCK

    Huh?

    > PICK UP SPECIAL ROCK

    Huh?

    > PICK UP THE SPECIAL ROCK

    You pick up the rock, it feels special in your hands, you are certain it will be important sometime later.

    > PUT ROCK IN POCKET

    Huh?

    > PUT SPECIAL ROCK IN POCKET

    Huh?

    > PUT SPECIAL ROCK IN MY POCKET

    I can't do that.

    > OPEN POCKET

    Huh?

    > OPEN MY POCKET

    You open your pocket.

    > PUT SPECIAL ROCK IN MY POCKET

    You safely store the rock.

It is no mystery why graphical adventure games basically wiped out the text adventure games.

Oh, you'd love the Apple II game called "Prisoner 2". It's entire purpose was to frustrate you at every turn with things you had to telepathically guess what the developer was thinking. The very first puzzle is a maze which is almost impossible to escape from... until you discover you can hit the 'ESC' key. It gets more dastardly from there.

I've though this is an opening for llm use. Feed all the possible valid commands to the llm and let it translate from anything close you type in.

That's bloat. Current Z-Machine interpreters and libraries (Inform6+Inform6lib and better with Inform 7) have a MUCH better parser than the typical adventures for limited 'computers' from the 80's.

The scale of the IF text-parser problem isn't that bad, and they addressed a lot of the issues decades ago, modern games don't struggle with this nearly as much. It's just that that Interactive Fiction tends to be a niche hobby, so most of the IF written today assumes you are already at least a intermediate in the field -- they often don't throw in a Tutorial, the way every modern triple-A game does.

From an 'intro accessibility' standpoint, Modern videogames are often way more willfully-obtuse. We just don't recognize it, because it's assumed that everyone who plays a game already has basic understanding of twin-stick first-person and third-person gamepad controls, we assume it like it's another form of basic literacy. (Who hasn't played a game before, right?)

But for folks who don't -- for the (many) folks who have literally never touched a gamepad in their life, sitting them down to modern graphical interactive-fiction controller game (say something like Firewatch, or Gone Home, or Edith Finch, or Life is Strange) is even more challenging for those folks than the traditional IF text parser.

I've seen people spend thirty minutes just trying to figure out how to look in a general direction -- it takes truly-new adults quite a while to get used to the feel of twin-thumbsticks for movement+camera-control, it requires a lot of careful fine-motor control on both sticks simultaneously and often has to be felt to be learned well.

At least with text-based IF, most people have been exposed to typing at school or at work or at a library or such. The same is not usually true of twin-thumbstick gamepads.

The IF community recognized these problems early (late 90's/early 2000's) and mitigated them with helpers and a lot of playtesting.

This is not really an issue in any games released in the last 20 years.

I think for me the worst "guess the verb" blocker was in Enchanter with the mouse hole and how to get the parchment out of it. Who the hell is going to think of "REACH IN HOLE"?

This nonsense still happens in the early sierra graphic adventures: Administer sobriety test!

And even 25... Anchorhead, Curses!, Slouch over Bedlam...

Miles ahead of the V3 version of the ZMachine and any Scott Adam adventure for outdated microcomputers from its era (C64, ZX...)

Graphical adventure games were largely parser-driven for like a decade. Sierra's AGI parser worked well; my recollection is that it usually looked for a verb and a noun and ignored any extraneous text.

There's some of that, and there's even a humorous game called Guess the Verb making that a game mechanic: https://www.ifwiki.org/Guess_the_Verb%21

but it's not so bad. I definitely run into this issue with graphical based games as well.

Ah yes the "ye can't get ye flask" moment.

Overly literal text parsers and the obligatory tedious maze portion of text adventures were the major pain points back in the day.

If you’re looking for some accessible ones to play Inhave very fond memories of the ones at Rinkworks:

http://www.rinkworks.com/adventure/

The site is straight from the late nineties; mobile wasn’t a concern at the time, and it remains not a concern. These are better consumed in a desktop. The whole site is a delightful bastion of “The Old Internet.” The role playing games are also plenty fun!

Always appreciate the GET LAMP shoutouts. - Jason Scott

Very first game I played on a computer was Zork 1. Old Commodore 64. I think I still have the disk jacket for it (but not the disk, sadly).

Mild spoiler warning!

I'm playing Hadean Lands at the moment and wasn't expecting to have to scroll past a map of the game.

Isn't that the map that comes with the game?

Edit: it's in the preview screenshots on the App Store. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hadean-lands/id918958300

Apparently it does, though this isn't mentioned anywhere that I've noticed. On the Mac it's hidden in a menu.

Colossal Cave Adventure (filename ADVENT) by William Crowther in 1976 on IFDB: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=fft6pu91j85y4acv

This is the game that started it all!

In my personal archives though, I only have a copy of the 1977 update by Dan Woods where the player can score a maximum of 350 points. This, I believe, is the Fortran source code of the 1977 version: http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/source/adv350-p...

I feel like IF tech could be use for more than just fiction. Imagine government forms that could use it to help people navigate a complex bureaucratic system of forms, or something like the python cookiecutter for generating project layouts which could ask for more detail about your preferences before spitting out a template, online tutorials which customise to cover the 3 main cases etc.

Six pages and no mention of Hunt the Wumpus which was thrilling text based spelunkers years before Colossal Cave Adventure

Also, NarraScope is in Albany, NY this weekend, if anyone is nearby and wants to check it out.

Also, this article misses a small point in time in 2007-2012 where Textfyre was an unsuccessful attempt at commercial IF.

One of the published games was written by Jon Ingold (with Ian Finley), called The Shadow in the Cathedral, which is available at https://textfyre.itch.io/.

I'm not sure, but I think this is the last parser-IF game Jon had a hand in...and may have been a spark for Inkle Studios.

Apparently there is Nine Princes in Amber text adventure game.

I remember a time where I was playing "A mind forever voyaging" every day while listening to "Jazz impressions from New York" by Dave Brubeck on endless repeat. Good times. Both are excellent pieces of art and I can attest that they complement each other very well.

"Interactive fiction" ..HOW the heck did "text adventures" end up with that name?? ALL games are "interactive fiction"!

Did some non-gamer blog or something start this?

The IF archive (IF standing for “interactive fiction”, and the archive containing exclusively text adventures and related content) has existed since 1992. So to answer your question, it is unlikely that a “non-gamer blog” invented the term. In fact, the rec.arts.int-fiction newsgroup apparently dates back to 1987, well before the concept of blogs, or really “gamer” in its modern sense, had come about.

According to Jimmy Maher (who would likely know best) the term was coined in 1979. https://www.filfre.net/2011/09/robert-lafores-interactive-fi...

It was used by Infocom to describe what they did.

Here is the box art to Zork: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zork#/media/File:Zork_I_box_ar...

Look at the lower right, it says "Interactive Fiction"

Oh haha, well I guess it was the ONLY "interactive fiction" back then! ^^

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