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Long post about a weird dream I had last night

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#weirddream @Andrew Plotkin @4am ❧ @DigiAntiquarian
in reply to Jayson Smith

Matt Campbell
Matt Campbell
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So, this is tangential, but now I'm curious: What was the first computer you had where Infocom games were accessible to you? Did you have any way of playing them with speech on an Apple II? Of course, those original Apple II Infocom disks can't be used with Textalker.
in reply to Matt Campbell

Jayson Smith
Jayson Smith
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@matt Nope. Amazingly, the first time I ever heard of Infocom that I know of was in 1994 when I was reading the AGT (Adventure Game Toolkit) version 1.5 documentation in which some of the testimonials claimed that with its advanced mode you could creat games close to those of Infocom. I didn't actually know what the Infocom games were until 1996 when I got Internet access and eventually found the IF community. Both times I had a PC running DOS. By this point I'd played a bit of Zork I, but that's about it. I never legally owned any Infocom games. Partly it was the cost, I was eighteen but still living with my parents, and while I had an allowance, I could never justify the purchase of Masterpieces, which probably would have been my only real option. And yet that didn't include Hitchhiker's Guide or Shogun, and I figured if I wanted a collection, it might as well be complete. Also the manuals/feelies/etc were in PDF which I couldn't read at all at the time, as I recall.
@Matt Campbell
in reply to Matt Campbell

Jayson Smith
Jayson Smith
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@matt Back in those days, of course, distributing Infocom game files (or story files as they were often called) on the Internet was a big no-no. These were the copyrighted works of Activision, and how dare you allow people to download them freely! I think it was in the late 90's when the BBC released a web-playable version of Hitchhiker's Guide. As far as I know, the Z-machine interpreter they used on the web wasn't at all accessible, but word got out that if you looked in your browser cache you could find the story file it ran. So of course I grabbed that and used Frotz to run it. Now, of course, the story files, not to mention source code, are all over the place.
@Matt Campbell
in reply to Matt Campbell

Jayson Smith
Jayson Smith
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@matt One really geeky thing happened in 1997 or so. IIRC as a promotion for one of their graphical Zork games, Activision released Zork 1, 2, and 3 in a downloadable package. Of course I eagerly downloaded it. No, I didn't need them, I already had those story files thanks to a friend who had sent me his small accessible PC games collection a year or two before. But I thought to myself, "Hmmm, Activision is going to want to put their own company name in the copyright notice for these games, which means they must have a working ZIL compiler!" ZIL was a huge fascination at the time, as it still is, and yet almost no information at all was known about it. Imagine my disappointment when I ran the story files only to see they were exactly the same story files I already had.
@Matt Campbell
in reply to Jayson Smith

Matt Campbell
Matt Campbell
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What's even more amusing is that Activision commissioned the development of a new Zork text IF game, a prequel or something, as a promotional thing for their new graphical Zork game, and that new IF game was developed using Inform.
in reply to Matt Campbell

Matt Campbell
Matt Campbell
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Ah, here it is, in Jimmy Maher's old online book about IF: maher.filfre.net/if-book/if-10… Search for "undiscovered underground"
in reply to Matt Campbell

Jayson Smith
Jayson Smith
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@matt Yup. But I understood that. This was a new game, being written from scratch. Zork 1, 2, and 3 were existing games, and assuming they had a working ZIL compiler and the sources (at that time it hadn't quite hit me that the Infocom development tools required a DECsystem-20 during most of their life, and couldn't just be run on a PC or something) they could change the Infocom name to Activision, at the very least.
@Matt Campbell
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