The Obsessively Complete Infocom Catalog | Hacker News Reader

The Obsessively Complete Infocom Catalog

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Advice fror people trying to get into text adventures: do not start with infocom games. Start with something like Glowgrass, Violet, The Dreamhold, Plundered Hearts*, or Lost Pig. They'pe friendlier to the player.

I get that the interface is a little fiddly at first, but it is highly conventional. Once you have spent a few minutes learning it, you unlock all other text adventures, of which there are many amazing ones.

I see many suggestions for using LLMs to improve the experience. I have tried that myself[2] and played others' attempts[3], and LLMs' world modeling abilities are currently insufficient for that[4]. They invent details that don't exist, they assume things have effects they don't, etc. They add more frustration than they remove.

Text adventures are often puzzle-paced, meaning they tell their story in drips separated by puzzles. These puzzles can be difficult. Best is to play with a friend -- you might get ideas from each other. If you have no interested friend, don't feel shame over looking at hints, or outright looking the solution up. But do let the puzzle simmer for a day first to make sure you've tried everything you can think of.

[1]: An Infocom game but rather different from the others.

[2]: https://entropicthoughts.com/evaluating-llms-playing-text-ad...

[3]: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=6nn0ihhejq2hrvh2&review=86904

[4]: More systematic paper on arXiv I've lost the link to but will post when I find it.

> do not start with infocom games

Generally yes, however Hitchhiker is the one huge exception to that. Its very accessible, well written and the BBC released a version for the web:

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

This must be a different version than the original, then. The original was exceedingly cruel, as Douglas Adams wanted to play practical jokes riffing on genre conventions.

I always liked it for the same reason you disliked it, but having read the book and the added room visuals in the BBC version might make it easier too. Liking Douglas Adams humor is also a big factor I imagine, I thought it was very funny.

It is very funny! That's why I felt no shame in looking up hints/walkthrough: I'm there for the writing and the exploration, not the puzzle which requires you to pick up a random item 1h before it's apparent you need it... :p

I remembered a comic panel that I'd seen in the New Zork Times back in the day, and I just found it...page 7 of this:

https://infodoc.plover.net/nzt/NZT4.4.pdf

The comic pokes fun at the ridiculously cruel babelfish puzzle. Which, I'm proud to say, I solved back in the day without assistance, after a full day's worth of effort, and requiring at one point to completely restart the game because of an apparently useless item I didn't pick up at the very beginning of the game (if you've solved it, you'll know the item I'm referring to).

But...while that was a nice achievement, I still got stuck later in the game, trying to fix the Nutrimatic.

I solved it as well.

... but I'm pretty sure my game copy had "Invisiclues" or whatever installed.

I'm curious why some of the games in the 90s re-releases had this and some did not.

I'm not aware of Invisiclues ever having been "installed." I'm only familiar with them as booklets with "invisible" ink. And, at least initially, they were created at least quasi-independently of Infocom by someone who later joined Infocom.

Oh yea! There was something in the manual, or in the installed hints about that invisible ink thing. Before my time.

The re releases I played they were under "hint" or "hints" or "help" or something.

There was an are you sure / really sure admonishment, then breadcrumb bit by bit hints towards solution.

May have been re-releases. I had a lot of the original games with feelies and (effectively) anti-pirating code wheels and the like. I think I have one of the CD re-releases and I play for a bit now and then with a Z interpreter.

Yes rereleases as I stated above. ( or meant to ) I recall my father being quite excited when he saw them. Not sure what games he played first on the Commodore, if any.

They amused me for a time at 9-10, then later at maybe 14-15 or so I got into them again playing on a Palm VIIx with a folding Stowaway keyboard. I also read through HHGTTG on that same device.

https://archive.org/details/sci-fi-collection-the-usa/ and the like.

I have fond memories of some z-machine interpreter on the Palm that I found easier to play with than anything on my desktop computer. There were lots of shortcut buttons and thanks to the stylus it was still easy to use those (vs a touchscreen using ony fingers where you need huge buttons to hit). You could also tap any word in the output to bring up a context menu of actions (e.g. to examine or pick up objects mentioned in room descriptions) and that list of actions was a combination of a configurable global list and a game-specific list you could add actions to. Could play through entire games and barely ever have to type anything. Had a folding keyboard, but no memory of using that for interactive fiction.

That sounds like an amazing interface. Would love that on my touchscreen device.

I help run the Interactive Fiction Database at https://ifdb.org.

You really can't go wrong browsing our list of the best games of all time. https://ifdb.org/search?browse

All of the top-rated games have walkthroughs or other hints for when you get stuck. My top advice for new players: use the hints.

This is a good point! I have personally decided to save some of the all-time greatest games until I am better at text adventures and can enjoy them with fewer hints.

I started playing Infocom games before there were online hints or even Invisiclues. I knew one of the authors quite well and resorted to (literally) calling him from time to time :-)

>You really can't go wrong browsing our list of the best games of all time. https://ifdb.org/search?browse

You can, because those games are the best according to the preferences of interactive fiction connaisseurs, and the preferences of connaisseurs never match those of the masses.

E.g. beer connaisseurs love IPAs, while most people find them way too bitter.

Beer connoisseurs don't love IPAs. Modern IPAs are the most like Budweiser rice beers that you can get in the fancy beer world, so that's what people who aspire to look like connoisseurs prefer. They prefer them to be very bitter, and/or flavored with exotic fruits, because they can't judge quality and rely on distinctness.

I just meant that absolutely none of those games suck.

The number one game on the list is a word game not a text adventure game.

If I played that as my first text adventure I’d think text adventures with like advanced scrabble or wordle.

IMO everyone should at least try Zork I. It was the first and the greatest, there's plenty of places to go, and much of it is pretty easy. Plus all these games constantly reference it in oblique ways. You should at least try your hand at Zork first.

> do not start with infocom games

Yeah, the filfre.net historian described how most Infocom games sold in tiny numbers to their fanbase. They are text adventures for the hard-core text-adventure enthusiast. (And that includes Zork II and III.)

> Plundered Hearts

> Hitchhikers Guide

Both these seemed super-linear. If you can't solve a puzzle, you are stuck and you die. Not recommended for newbies imo. (Plundered Hearts is a 'romance novel' rather than the usual d&d shit.)

It is the first, but Zork as a game and quality of entertainment is pretty bad. If you do not have infinite time your time might be spent better elsewhere.

Courses for horses, I guess. I find spending the time to solve a text adventure (ideally without hints) to be more enjoyable than most forms of gaming, but then I like crossword puzzles too.

"put all into thing"

"I got the Babel Fish T shirt"

How did the infamous Babel fish puzzle originate?

The basic idea was by Douglas, and I added some refinements (like the Upper-Half-Of-The-Room Cleaning Robot). More interesting is how close the puzzle came to being removed from the game; most of Infocom’s testing group thought it was too hard. I was going into a meeting with them just as Douglas was leaving for the airport at the end of his final trip to Infocom, and I asked him, “What should I tell them about the Babel fish puzzle?” He said, “What should you tell them? Tell them to fuck off!” So the puzzle stayed… and its very hardness became a cult thing. Infocom even sold T-shirts that said “I got the Babel fish.”

-- Steve Meretzky

I actually solved the babelfish way back when, and then got stuck somewhere else. At that point I realized the game was a railroad. A lot of people's first and last text adventure experience.

Agree that everyone should play Zork to get an appreciation of the original genre and history. IIRC, the three Zorks were actually all part of the original Zork on the PDP and it had to be chopped into three parts to make it fit on the 8-bit micros of the 1970s-1980s.

Yep, the original Zork was a big sprawling game. I originally played the (pirate?) pdp version when I was like 6 years old. A few years ago I took one of the c versions (this one one was run through f2c and then cleaned up by Ian Lance Taylor) and ported it to wasm. I also added in a mapping system using my favorite dungeon map. You can play it at https://dungeo.org/

Nice! The amber phosphor option takes me back. My old Apple II+ had a small amber monitor with the two floppy drives stacked to the side.

True, I just think they cut the 'less good' parts out of the micro Zork I and then put them in the sequels. (Although the balloon part was cool.) You may or may not like the game's aesthetic, but 75% of Zork I is pretty accessible.

How good are LLMs at actually playing the adventure games? Can they win?

Not really, no. They get stuck extremely easily. They can last longer with hand-holding but they still get stuck.

Humans also get stuck, to be fair, but tend to be more inventive and methodical in trying to get unstuck, and more intelligent in what to pay attention to. LLMs play like a three year old with advanced vocabulary and infinite patience.

LLMs also by nature don't learn from their experiences. Even within the same context window their past mistakes only increase the propensity of generating similar mistakes.

I don't know. Trinity might be a good starting point. Zork on the other hand is often suggested but I find it so annoying, if you don't solve a certain quest early you're automatically locked out of victory.

I would love to see pictures and unboxing of the feelies.

Those were before my time. I played many of these as part of the "Comedy Collection", "Sci Fi Collection" etc re-releases when I was 9-10 or so. Later searching for free "games" for my Palm VIIx, I found a Z machine interpreter and played a few of them on my PDA. Comment from a few days ago pasted below.

---

First time (only time?) a game made me cry, Floyd's death. 13-15 or so, Up way too late, hiding under my blanket to muffle the noise from the folding Stowaway keyboard, playing on a glowing green 160x160 LCD display on a Palm VIIx running a Z machine interpreter.

Apparently the author still gets emails now and then to this day about how Floyd’s death affected players. He used to have a personal site but I can’t find it now. A lot of players have written about this moment.

I think the other one I beat was Bureaucracy, by Douglas Adams. Got somewhat deep in Beyond Zork and HHGTTG, but don’t think I completed them.

I remember my father getting excited when he saw those Infocom compilations on Walmart store shelves.

I’ve also considered introducing those to my son. He’s 5 now. Lately having him play Mario RPG, Zelda, and Final Fantasy to practice reading.

—-

“Perhaps the most amazing thing about the creation of Floyd was how easy it was. The entire code and text for the character, if printed out, would perhaps run to ten pages. What’s amazing is not that I was able to create a computer game character that touched people so deeply, but how infrequently the same thing has been accomplished in the intervening two decades.”

Steve Meretzky

Next weekend is the next Ludum Dare https://ldjam.com game making contest. Perhaps we need more text adventures?

These days you can probably vibe code an engine using SpaCy for commands and some kind of word salad LLM or something to make the output more flowery

There's quite a lot of pure interactive fiction comps, and a lot of viable authoring systems: https://www.ifwiki.org

LLMs have an obvious application of removing the command limitations. https://github.com/UlfarErl/lampgpt

"FYI, it is now possible to play all of the Infocom games with a phenomenal parser using LampGPT, with just ./lampgpt.py -O gamename."

I do see a lot of potential application for LLMs around having a natural dialogue with an NPC in future games. Also LLMs to well-defined structured parser instructions might finally enable Strongbad to "get ye flask".

Ugh, I'm so glad this exists; I tried some text adventures a few years ago and struggled to get into them due in part to having to cooperate with a rather baroque user interface.

I feel like this could really open them up to a new generation.

I guess I never had a problem with the Infocom parser -- it seemed already so much more advanced than other adventure games that generally only understood two word commands like "GET KEY". In Infocom games you could say things like "get the key and put it in the bag".

This is amazing! I remember playing some of these in the 90s. Fond memories.

BTW, this site is likely not set up to handle a HN hug of death of downloads so consider throttling your downloads if you can.

A Mind Forever Voyaging was the first time I ever realized that video games could aspire to more than just being a fun pastime or distraction.

I really liked AMFV, probably because I was never great at the puzzles. I don't think it was a super-popular game because a lot of the fam base probably largely played the games for the puzzles. But one of my favorites and actually completed it without help.

In many ways it was a forerunner of the sort of adventure game today that is called (originally as an insult, but the genre has later embraced the term) "walking simulators", in which the player simply explores an environment without solving puzzles or fighting monsters (or at least not very often).

It is Pitch Black

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nigRT2KmCE

Hm. I have to challenge a list that doesn’t include George Alec Effinger’s Circuit’s Edge. I get that it was written after the hayday of Infocom, but it was completely within the spirit and craft.

It isn't really related to the Infocom that released the Zork games, except in a legal sense. Infocom was sold to Activision in 1986, and shut down as a studio in 1989. Circuit's Edge was published in 1990, labelled "Infocom" but just because that's the brand Activision chose to market it under.

Legally, no. But it was written in the spirit of Infocom games — all the gameplay is designed around text narrative, with the classic text parser to drive the action — and Effinger had connections with the actual Infocom team (he wrote their Zork paperback adaptations). And Michael E. Moore from Infocom was the associate producer, they'd phone him for game direction and advice.

I think it's spiritually an Infocom game. If the company had persisted and there were any future in adventure games, Circuit’s Edge is exactly what they would have produced.

This is without a doubt the best podcast for all things infocom: https://monsterfeet.com/grue/

Very few companies in gaming have Infocom's enduring power. I wonder if it will still be remembered 100 years from now.

I just wish someone would make a first person version of AMFV. It would need to be a really different game to stay true to AMFV but I think it could revolve around not getting shut down by the bureaucrats.

No BattleTech? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BattleTech:_The_Crescent_Haw...

IF: yeah I’m a fan and once started to teach myself Inform 6, way back when. My greatest accomplishment was translating a random haiku generator in Inform 6. I sort of lost interest as Inform 7 was coming on the scene.

How do I play/run these games?

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