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Comment by bernds74 | Hacker News Reader

For interactive fiction at least there are still people interested in it, and people are preserving Infocom history in particular. Other games might get forgotten over time unfortunately, especially on more obscure systems. Nobody ever brings up Turrican anymore when discussing game soundtracks...

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Not just the classics, there is actually a thriving interactive fiction community producing new games regularly. The annual Interactive Fiction Competition usually gets 60-70 entries each year.

https://ifcomp.org/

Yep. There are new converts as well like myself. I like modern titles ranging from AAA titles like Doom to smaller indie titles like Kentucky Route Zero which is more like an interactive theater play than a traditional game. However, IF just really scratches an itch when done well and exercises the brain in a different way. I've played with the old INFOCOM games (Zork, Planetfall...etc), but they don't grip me the same way the modern titles do. They're also obscenely hard in ways we don't typically do these days. I noticed the new Doom game lets you modify the difficulty and damage percentage done to you or enemies at any time. As an adult with little time I love not getting stuck in boss battles for hours. Life is too short. Old games didn't have any of that lol.

I think a lot of players liked the insanely hard. A Mind Forever Voyaging was really well written but relatively easy—which is probably why I especially liked it. But I don’t believe it sold especially well.

Some players might have enjoyed extremely punishing games, but I think most players—and game designers—simply didn’t know any better. Creating a challenge that still feels fair is a difficult balance. Look at the old Sierra adventure games, for example. While they are excellent in terms of storytelling and creativity, they tend to be absolute garbage in terms of gameplay by modern standards. Many of the puzzles were outright impossible unless you had a guidebook, and you sometimes wouldn’t even be told what you did wrong earlier in the game that made the game unsolvable (looking at you, Space Quest jetpack puzzle).

But those games were rightly hailed as pioneers of the genre, and were considered to be the very best in their time. By today’s standards, though, they would be universally panned as abusive of the player, if they could even be released at all.

I have incurable nostalgia for the genre (both graphical and pure text adventures) but it's hard to play them without a walkthrough nowadays. The games are simply not fun by modern standards. Their mere existence was a miracle back then and a lot of the excitement was related to interacting with the computer at all. I'd love to be able to recover this sense of wonder but I suspect that most of it was about discovering the world as a child.

I wasn’t a child; post-college but also at a stage where I was willing to devote more time to games than I am today though never a serious gamer. I also knew/know a lot of the people involved early-on. I do fiddle with the games now and then but not super-seriously.

I've been playing through every adventure ever made in chronological order, so you can watch me do it so you don't have to

http://bluerenga.blog

just reached 1983 which has Planetfall

Save states and walkthroughts/faqs/hints can provide the help you need, although some people think these are cheating. I'm fine "cheating", though, as long as I'm "cheating myself" and not others.

Since Infocom games run on everything from a Palm Pilot to a mainframe, there's no reason for them to ever go away, as long as we can find people still interested in building Z-Machines for the latest gear.

> there's no reason for them to ever go away, as long as we can find people still interested in building Z-Machines for the latest gear.

I’ve never heard this term z-machines, but it’s interesting, and invokes in my mind a machine that does anything you need regarding z. Specifically I’m reminded of zMUD, but that might be dating myself a bit. Is this z-machine idea your own, or did you happen upon it? Can you think of other memorable or especially useful z-machines in modern usage?

Z machines are the interpreters that allow you to play the same game code on whatever hardware you want.

zMud was a MUD client, so in some ways not so dissimilar in the sense that they both allow you to play text-based games.

I’ve never heard this term z-machines

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-machine

Before the page even refreshed for my original reply, I thought, "huh, I bet the Z is for Zork," and wouldn't you know, it is. That's a pretty good name, when you can grok it from context.

Trying to follow the timeline from that article, it's unclear from context name which came first, Zork, ZIL (Zork Implementation Language), or the word z-machine. I've heard of referring to other systems as [language name/interpreter name/etc]-machine, so that's the context that it reminds me of, but at the time Zork was written, perhaps that convention wasn't established yet? It's before my time, which makes the missing context harder to interrogate solo.

Turrican will be preserved like Infocom. But I fear they will all be forgotten in the depths of a digital computer history museum. I'd love with LLMs could really bring the excitement of text adventures back. It has been tried but so far it's still in the text version of the uncanny valley.

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