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Zork to return in MMO form
If you're old like me, you may remember the classic world of Zork. It was a text-based adventure game (and series of games) created in the late 70s that was the inspiration for most, if not all, story-rich computer games of our day. Well, now it will be coming to an internet browser near you as a persistent MMO. Dublin-based Jolt Online Gaming is joining with Activision, who owns the rights to Zork, for a browser-based MMO centered around the world of the Infocom classic. "The Great Underground Empire has recently fallen and the land is in disarray," the game's website describes. "The stock market has collapsed, leading even mighty FrobozzCo International to fire employees from throughout its subsidiaries. A craze of treasure-hunting has swept through the remnants of the Great Underground Empire. It's a dangerous time to be a newly-unemployed traveling salesman, but it's also a great time to try a bit of adventuring."Check out the official website for more information and to sign up for up-to-date news on the development of this game.
Splashing through the MUD and the MUSH
Before forum trolls complained of bad graphics or crappy voice acting, there was text-based gaming. Progressing from the success of games like Zork and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the multi-user dungeons (MUDs) and multi-user shared hallucinations (MUSHes) were our best methods of roleplaying and interacting with other people from across the globe. Without these original text-based experiences, we would not have any of the MMOs we have today.To pay homage to this fact, Kaila Hale-Stern at Gawker's io9 writes a telling narrative of the old days in MUDs and MUSHes. PernMUSH, a MUSH based on Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern series was (and still is) an extremely popular online hub for roleplayers. This story tells of Kaila's experiences with PernMUSH and how magical they were "for a sixteen year-old with a 36kbps modem and a family phone line." Be sure to check out the pages of comments as well, as they each tell their own memories of the birth of online gaming and roleplaying.
J.J. Abrams would like to make a Zork game
OK, so maybe not a Zork game per se, but some sort of text adventure would be right up Infocom fan (and Lost creator) J.J. Abrams' alley. That revelation comes from a recent conversation the writer/producer/director had with MTV, which you can find after the break. Though he's at least half-kidding, he says he'd be interested in trying to create a really good parser and simulation of human interaction.His text adventure fondness shouldn't come as a complete surprise, considering that Locke and Co. spent all of Season Two playing the world's most boring adventure game.
As the 3G iPhone draws near, what's your plan of attack?
And so forth. If you're like many of us, you very well could be weighing your options as the 3G iPhone seems increasingly imminent. Some might have a wad of cash already laid aside, others might be thinking of jumping ship to one of the iPhone's numerous competitors, or just getting some more months of utility out of their current iPhone. And then there's the trouble of disposing of your existing iPhone when you do upgrade. Do you give it to a friend, mount it on the wall, or bury it in the backyard with the hope of growing it into a cute little iPhone tree? The options are endless. Let us know which way you're leaning.%Poll-14190%%Poll-14197%
Animations to die for
I was chatting with a friend the other day (shut up! I do too have friends!) and we were playing reference poker -- you know, someone makes a comment referring to some aspect of pop culture, and the other person replies in kind. She said ' ... you are eaten by a grue.' I made the obligatory Zork return reference and we moved on, but the bit about being eaten stayed with me for some reason. That night, I was running around in WoW and realized that nobody in Azeroth is eaten by anything.Why can't we have encounter-specific death animations? I, for one, would love a chance to be messily devoured by a Sludge Beast! I can imagine the horrific wounds as it slid over me, eating away at my flesh until only bones remained. A much more affecting experience than merely swooning and dropping dead, as though nothing more mortal than narcolepsy had occurred. Or how about a set of pre-built death animations, available at the touch of a key? Everything from 'clutching at your heart: myocardial infarction', to 'going white as a sheet and dropping dead from fright', to 'Scanners cranial explosion'. In fact, wouldn't this make pulling off the ol' 'Feign Death' trick a lot more fun? I'm telling you, it's the little things in life that make existence bearable. Let's see more creativity with our dying moments, developers! Believe me, you stand to ... make a killing. Hahaha! Oh, I slay me.
LotRO quest inspired by Apple II text adventures
It seems that most gamers these days haven't played any of the old Apple II computer games, much less the particularly ancient text-based adventure ones. Most people now see them as arcane and even intimidating. Those black & white fossils bear no relation to something as modern as say, The Lord of the Rings Online, right?Wrong! Gaming's old-timers will be tickled to hear that a quest in Tal Bruinen was inspired by a gameplay mechanic from an Apple II text adventure game. A Turbine employee revealed this behind-the-scenes tidbit in a thread about the quest on the official LotRO forums.The Apple II was the first widely successful personal computer. It had a large library of games, many of which are cornerstones of computer gaming history. You can play a lot of those games in your web browser at virtualapple.org, one of the best online emulators. It has many of the all-time classic RPGs like Ultima, Might and Magic, and Wizardry as well.
Interactive fiction on the iPhone
Before the iPod and the iPhone, there was iFiction-- err, interactive fiction, which is what we now call what I used to know of as "text adventures," those text-based games where you moved "north," "look," and then "pick up phone."But now, interactive fiction has met the iPhone-- spathiwa has created a z-machine interpreter for the iPhone, which means that (once you've jailbroken it), you too can play all the old favorites-- Hitchhiker's Guide and Zork, and even newer (relatively) stuff like So Far. I never even considered the idea of typing "eat analgesic" with the iPhone's text entry, but combining old school gaming with new school gadgetry is always cool.The latest version (.2) even saves games when the iPhone is put to sleep, so now you can play your favorite text adventure till the end where ever you take your iPhone.Thanks, Mark!
The History of Zork examines a legend
The idea of a commercially successful videogame with nary a single picture is, in today's market, absurd. But there was a day when the typed word reigned supreme, and Zork was the undisputed king. Gamasutra has just posted a thorough history of Zork discussing its lasting impact on games and the gaming community. The article is the first in what will be a series of features presenting detailed official histories of each of the first ten games voted into the Digital Game Canon.A whole generation of gamers have grown up with graphics as the centerpiece of entertainment. Many haven't played a single text-based game, let alone the granddaddy of them all. Despite its downtrodden reputation with the "new, hip" modern gamer, interactive fiction is thriving with authors such as Emily Short stretching the boundaries with every release. Even though text adventures aren't as flashy, they're the stuff real gaming is made of.
Community plays collaborative Zork, grues tremble in fear
Normally considered single-player experiences, the text adventure genre has just taken a large step in a collaboratively multiplayer direction. Several members of the Idle Thumbs forum community have designed a special forum-bot that plays text adventures with other members. His name is Ziggy.At the moment, Ziggy is programmed to play Zork, a classic text adventure made by Infocom in the late 70s. In a thread started by Ziggy, players post replies with commands like "go north" or "take letter." Ziggy then replies, performs the commands, and continues the game.The Ziggy threads allow for commenting as well, giving players the chance to discuss moves before executing them. This makes the whole a great deal more collaborative, although so far it hasn't been helping. The first play-through of Zork resulted in death at the hands of a hungry cyclops, and the second at the hands of a hungry grue. It's clear that after two losses in a row, the adventurers could use a little extra help in their third attempt. Anyone know the way to the Great Underground Empire? [Via GameSetWatch]
Reinventing the graphic novel--for iPod
Playlist magazine tells us that the graphic novel is being reinvented for the iPod. The Many Worlds of Jonas Moore combines live action video with computer animation and other media. Due to be released this summer, it brings the "graphic novel" to a new place. "Jonas Moore" still has the traditional comic book look (as you can see here) but it will also leverage the iPod's multimedia capabilities.
Charming hand-drawn Dungeon map predates Zork
Everyone should know that we're big fans of Zork here at Joystiq HQ (it's one of the 10 most important games, remember?). So it's doubly exciting to see this map pop up all over the place today. At first blush, it may appear to be a charming, hand-drawn map of Infocom's seminal text-adventure game, but upon closer inspection it doesn't match up. Why? Because it's a map of the mainframe version of Dungeon, the antecedent to Zork, "equivalent to Zork I + about half of Zork II + the endgame of Zork III." Better still, there's DOS, Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux versions to go along with the map, so there's no excuse not to play it![Via Cathode Tan]
Text adventures arrive on the DS via unofficial channels
We can't tell you to download them (in fact, we'll tell you not to), but we can definitely applaud the technical achievement. A homebrew genius called papafuji has ported a massive selection of classic text adventures and early graphic adventure games to the DS, including all of Infocom's text adventures and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams' interactive fiction.These aren't just barebones ports, either: you can save games, and you can choose to enter text via an onscreen keyboard or handwriting input! And the game engine contains shorthand functionality for common commands like cardinal directions and "get". Some of the games are public domain, but most aren't, and we aren't sure which games fall in which category. Therefore, we're officially warning you: if you download these games, there's a good chance that you are a pirate.[Thanks, Joq!]
Imagination beats everything
RetroBlast's Motivational Poster Contest has come to a close, and the winning Zork entry is pretty spectacular. Simple, but spectacular, we'd love to order one if we could. Infocom's games always took place inside your head, because they were just text on a screen, but they were some of the best games ever written.Check out the winners and all the other entries. Have a favorite that didn't make it to the top? Still want to design your own? Let us know about it.
Infocom: from Zork to business software
"You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here."If you've never experienced the bliss of staring at the above -- the opening line of text adventure classic Zork -- you're missing out on one of the formative titles in video game history. This week, The Escapist takes a cursory look at Infocom, the company behind Zork, and what became of them. In short, they blew it on a piece of business software called Cornerstone (yuck). While The Escapist piece (ironically titled "The Short, Happy Life of Infocom") is far too short to encapsulate the company's meteoric success or their similarly swift demise at the hands of Activision, lucky for us, there is an exhaustively researched study done by some MIT students (natch) in 2000 that is still taking up residency on the web. Down From the Top of Its Game: The Story of Infocom, Inc. is available in an easy to read, 50-page PDF here so, if The Escapist piece whets your appetite for text adventure, you can have seconds.See also:Interactive phiction: Zork phone demo is online
Interactive phiction: Zork phone demo is online
Remember ZoiP (née Zasterisk), the open source implementation of the text-adventure classic that you play on the phone? Installation required rolling up your sleeves and installing some *NIX-y stuff which, despite my urgent desire to experience this, I never got around to doing. Fine, the real reason I never got around to doing it was because the project's author, simon, promised to have a call-in number available to test the project out. Why do today what someone else will do for you later, y'know what I'm saying?It's later and, true to his word, simon's put the public beta of ZoiP online. All it took was a little linkage from Boing Boing, Make: Blog, digg, and ... ahem ... Joystiq to get the old motivation meter up. Here's how you do it: Call 416-548-7557 (Toronto, ON, Canada) which is the "best quality." Otherwise try 360-226-7386 (WA, USA) which is "a little choppy." Or use a SIP-compliant program like Gizmo and add zoip@demo.zoip.org and dial out. This method worked the best for me (and it's free). I'm not sure if it's just me, but some calls seem to go much better than others in regards to voice recognition. On some, I can roll right through, other times I'm stuck repeating myself more often than "blue" in Brain Age. He warns to speak naturally, as "careful enunciation actually seems to make things worse." Give it a shot and let us know how far you get.
Stuck on hold? Zork is the new soft jazz
Forget Michael Bolton, Zork is the best hold music ever! From Zasterisk:"I was tinkering with Asterisk and the Festival text-to-speech engine, and wrote some short Asterisk::AGI scripts to read back live weather reports. After that, I thought I needed something more interactive to work with..."Now Zork is back! Listen as the eerie voice of Festival takes you into the Underground Empire, and marvel as you explore this world with your dial pad, unlocking the secrets within!"You'll need to install the Asterisk open source phone-switcher (*NIX only, that includes you Mac users), the Festival text-to-speech application, and then let Zasterisk work its special brand of magic, turning that boring phone tree into a maze of twisty little passages, all alike. Too much work, you say? Good news! On March 13th the project's creator, simon, announced "over the next few weeks I'll be putting a public beta online for you to call in to." A few weeks is, like, right now! We're officially on the lookout.[Via Boing Boing]
"Do you know where I can find some sailors?"
The Armchair Empire has thrown together a list of what they believe to be the top ten in-game quotes. The list ranges from the bizarre (including the title to this post) to the classic ("All Your Base"). A good way to catch up on the last couple of decades of, how shall we put this, memorable lines from video games.My personal choices: "Hehehe! This is gonna be good!" - A Dwarf from Myth II just before he's about to blow up a crowd of Thrall with a molotov cocktail. It doesn't sound like much but if you've ever played Myth II you'll probably agree. "(singing) On the eleventh day of Christmas, Blizzard gave to me: eleven Science Vessels..." - This is a singing science vessel from the StarCraft Map of the Month: The Twelve Days of Starcraft. Random eh? "OBJECTION!!!" - From Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, natch. This isn't any objection in particular, although the times where either Phoenix or the Prosecution objects to the Judge's Guilty/Not Guilty verdict are probably the best. What are you favorite video game quotes?[Via Evil Avatar]
