The Daily Ping

Last September I talked about Infocom and their wonderful text adventure games of the 1980s. I recently fired up the CD-ROM I have with 30 Infocom games on there and came across some other text adventures, “interactive fiction,” that had been written in the mid-1990s for a competition.

Turns out, that competition still exists. Interactive fiction is alive and well, yielding tens of thousands of results on Google. Despite all the many advances in graphics, processing power, and disk storage, these small text adventure games are still capturing people’s imaginations. And I understand why… I tried out one or two different games and quickly found myself hooked, carefully reading the descriptions, forming a mental picture. To this day, there’s no game that grabs me like A Mind Forever Voyaging (especially since I recently came across the original packaging and instruction booklet), even though it didn’t have a single graphic.

Interactive fiction is more immersive than you’d think. Why not grab a game and give it a shot? Or maybe design your own? -ram