Hi gang!
I started gaming on a Commodore 64, now plenty of years ago, and I've always had a pretty diverse interest / curiosity in games. I enjoy action games, card games, simulations, adventures (Maniac Mansion & Zak McKraken & the Alien Mindbenders were pretty awesome) and... text adventures, now often referred to as "interactive fiction".
If you're talking text adventures you can't ignore Infocom. Seriously: those adventures were mindblowing in their time, both because of the often intense storylines, the depth, but also because many games could even give you a sense of multitasking! This was pretty unheard of back then... What I mean by that? Most text adventures are single player games where you go through a story as the protagonist and you need to rely on whatever the engine can tell you.
Here's the thing: in most of the text adventures back in the days NPC's were essentially backdrops. If you encountered an NPC in "room 1" then rest assured: they'd still be there if you took a major detour and eventually found your way back.
And then there was Infocom...
One of my favorite titles is Suspended which gives you control over 6 robots where each has a specific sense (audio, visual, waveforms) or ability (being able to grasp stuff or look things up in a database). The fun part is that you can tell robot 1 to "do" something ("Go to room A") after which you could tell robot 2 to do something else ("examine the room", "examine door", "south", "examine room"), but while you were doing that robot 1 continued to travel to their destination and would eventually also let you know when they arrived.
That was pretty radical for that time... Now, this was one of my favorite games but the Zork series is what made Infocom really stand out and become more popular:
Z Engine on FreeBSD!
So, here's the thing => the mechanic behind these adventures is a specific interpreter, known as the Z-Machine. And you may have guessed by now: this engine eventually became open source, and is also part of the FreeBSD ports collection!
If you have some Infocom image files and enjoy working on the console then definitely grab games/frotz so you can actually play those. Some well known names are Zork (obviously), Starcross, Suspended, Planetfall (+ "Stationfall") ... even Shogun (<= the awesome book by James Clavell; notice how the official page (!) also references this adventure game?).
Now... I'm not 100% sure of the full legality regarding the availability of these images so I'm not going into more detail on that. I am going to tell you that there are a lot of places on the Net, such as Archive dot org, through which you can get hold of these. And then play them on FreeBSD, as you can see happening above.
Z engine editor
Now... playing such games is one thing. How about creating some of your own? => If you're interested in actually building an adventure ("interactive story") then I can highly recommend grabbing games/inform7. Inform (official website: here) is a programming language specifcally designed for these kinds of games. The cool part is that its syntax is basically common English but used in a specific structured syntax. It's well documented so it shouldn't be too hard to get your fingers behind all this.
I also also highly recommend the Windows client which gives you a full experience:
(and before you shout "offtopic" => keep in mind that emulators/wine is also a thing?)
Oh, and maybe a tip... if you plan on going down this route then don't forget about ZTools => Git repository right here. ZTools allows you to "decompile" existing images so that you can get hold of the source code and optionally change and / or rebuild things.. maybe using Inform?
Fun fact (true story) => I once paid Fl 23,99 for Suspended, and I still think it was worth every penny.
I know this stuff is heavily dated and probably not interesting for most of you, but yah... still couldn't help share this tidbit. games/nethack is also pretty awesome... but it's not Zork either
I started gaming on a Commodore 64, now plenty of years ago, and I've always had a pretty diverse interest / curiosity in games. I enjoy action games, card games, simulations, adventures (Maniac Mansion & Zak McKraken & the Alien Mindbenders were pretty awesome) and... text adventures, now often referred to as "interactive fiction".
If you're talking text adventures you can't ignore Infocom. Seriously: those adventures were mindblowing in their time, both because of the often intense storylines, the depth, but also because many games could even give you a sense of multitasking! This was pretty unheard of back then... What I mean by that? Most text adventures are single player games where you go through a story as the protagonist and you need to rely on whatever the engine can tell you.
Here's the thing: in most of the text adventures back in the days NPC's were essentially backdrops. If you encountered an NPC in "room 1" then rest assured: they'd still be there if you took a major detour and eventually found your way back.
And then there was Infocom...
One of my favorite titles is Suspended which gives you control over 6 robots where each has a specific sense (audio, visual, waveforms) or ability (being able to grasp stuff or look things up in a database). The fun part is that you can tell robot 1 to "do" something ("Go to room A") after which you could tell robot 2 to do something else ("examine the room", "examine door", "south", "examine room"), but while you were doing that robot 1 continued to travel to their destination and would eventually also let you know when they arrived.
That was pretty radical for that time... Now, this was one of my favorite games but the Zork series is what made Infocom really stand out and become more popular:
Z Engine on FreeBSD!
So, here's the thing => the mechanic behind these adventures is a specific interpreter, known as the Z-Machine. And you may have guessed by now: this engine eventually became open source, and is also part of the FreeBSD ports collection!
If you have some Infocom image files and enjoy working on the console then definitely grab games/frotz so you can actually play those. Some well known names are Zork (obviously), Starcross, Suspended, Planetfall (+ "Stationfall") ... even Shogun (<= the awesome book by James Clavell; notice how the official page (!) also references this adventure game?).
Now... I'm not 100% sure of the full legality regarding the availability of these images so I'm not going into more detail on that. I am going to tell you that there are a lot of places on the Net, such as Archive dot org, through which you can get hold of these. And then play them on FreeBSD, as you can see happening above.
Z engine editor
Now... playing such games is one thing. How about creating some of your own? => If you're interested in actually building an adventure ("interactive story") then I can highly recommend grabbing games/inform7. Inform (official website: here) is a programming language specifcally designed for these kinds of games. The cool part is that its syntax is basically common English but used in a specific structured syntax. It's well documented so it shouldn't be too hard to get your fingers behind all this.
I also also highly recommend the Windows client which gives you a full experience:
(and before you shout "offtopic" => keep in mind that emulators/wine is also a thing?)
Oh, and maybe a tip... if you plan on going down this route then don't forget about ZTools => Git repository right here. ZTools allows you to "decompile" existing images so that you can get hold of the source code and optionally change and / or rebuild things.. maybe using Inform?
Fun fact (true story) => I once paid Fl 23,99 for Suspended, and I still think it was worth every penny.
I know this stuff is heavily dated and probably not interesting for most of you, but yah... still couldn't help share this tidbit. games/nethack is also pretty awesome... but it's not Zork either