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Comment by Slothrop99 | Hacker News Reader

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.)

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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.

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.

"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.

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