Dinner table conversation tonight ended up chatting about Mystery House, that my partner played occasionally when she was younger. Mystery House is known as the first graphical adventure game. That of course led the conversation into interactive fiction, referencing the top shelf of my bookcase which contains pretty much all of Infocom‘s text adventures. I remember Zork II was my first text adventure and fiendish it was. I relied on adventure columns in computer game magazines of the time for clues on how to solve difficult puzzles including the horrible baseball diamond puzzle, also known as the Oddly Angled Room.

In those days, I couldn’t google answers and would spend months stuck on a problem. Sometimes that could be a good thing but mostly it was bloody frustrating. While there was a certain sense of achievement in solving puzzles, it meant I couldn’t advance the story. Solving puzzles was essential to accessing further parts of the game. These days I think I prefer story telling and plot development though solving puzzles is nice too. Happily most games provide decent hint mechanisms and if I get desperate I can google for answers.

Much to the shock of my partner, I commented that I usually have my text adventure collection stored on all my active machines as they are part of my central core of files that migrate across my various computing environments. This sounds substantial until you realise that text adventures, having little graphics and don’t take up a lot of space. My entire interactive fiction archive is a little over 100MB, of which the complete works of infocom account for 95%. Come to think of it, they were the only ones I was able to buy as a box set later, the Lost Treasures of Infocom, and load in a system independent format.

The other key adventure game company of the time was Level 9. Infocom were American based, while Level 9 were from the UK and I had several of their games. Regrettably, while I still have the boxes, I no longer have the equipment to read the discs. Later on, graphic adventures developed further with Magnetic Scrolls commencing with their first game, the fantastic The Pawn. I have several titles of their titles on my shelf too. Methinks I need to investigate further as to whether I can get these on my current machines. Come to think of it, I’ve barely mentioned Sierra Online who were responsible for Mystery House and later developed the King’s Quest and SpaceQuest series. Oh, and then there was Ultima…yet another rabbit hole…