There's going to be lots of these anecdotes, but Zork was the first computer game I ever obsessed over, on my cousin's C64.
Hand-drawn maps and notes about clues, getting eaten by the grue on purpose, getting frustrated at the maze of twisty passages, and of course entering random curse words just to be scolded by the game. Much more recently, I played a web-browser based port of the game and even accounting for nostalgia, it held up for me!
1977: Zork
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Re: 1977: Zork
#12Does anyone know of tools to make very basic text games and publish them to the web... like Choose Your Own Adventure type stories?
Twine: https://twinery.org
This.
While TADS, Inform and others are sophisticated tools (more like programming languages, really) to build adventures like Zork or even more complex, for a simple Choose Your Own Adventure something like Twine is better.
Re: 1977: Zork
#13Anyone play Aidungeon.io? They hooked GPT-3 up to make a Zork where you can do basically anything and the game will come back with something that's at least interesting.
It's interesting how crazy new tech concepts come in as pure text first. For example, MUDs were the first MMORPGs back in the 90s.
Re: 1977: Zork
#14Some material for those that want to dig further:
1. Get Lamp, a documentary film on text adventures and Infocom, a legendary publisher of test adventure games.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Get_Lamp
2. Twisty Little Passages by By Nick Montfort. A book applying literary critique to text adventure games.
Re: 1977: Zork
#15You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike. and It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue. are such iconic phrases, they bring a ton of good memories to my mind. And I never even finished Zork or Adventure!
I was late for Zork and only played "Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy" with friends. This essential command I will always remember:
Take tea and no teaRe: 1977: Zork
#16Does anyone know of tools to make very basic text games and publish them to the web... like Choose Your Own Adventure type stories?
If you're interested in trying to do it in Rust, I've made a series of simple text games that you could use as an example [0]. Rust will work for web and someone has added web support for these, but I haven't merged it in yet.
Re: 1977: Zork
#17Does anyone know of tools to make very basic text games and publish them to the web... like Choose Your Own Adventure type stories?
Twine: https://twinery.org
Inky as well https://www.inklestudios.com/ink/
Re: 1977: Zork
#18Anyone play Aidungeon.io? They hooked GPT-3 up to make a Zork where you can do basically anything and the game will come back with something that's at least interesting. It's interesting how crazy new tech concepts come in as pure text first. For example, MUDs were the first MMORPGs back in the 90s.
MUDs were the first MMORPGs back in the 90s
Early 80's via BBSes, online services, and BBS networks like ARBnet. BBS play was slow, but it was so novel and compelling, you didn't care.
Re: 1977: Zork
#19Does anyone know of tools to make very basic text games and publish them to the web... like Choose Your Own Adventure type stories?
I've used this angular framework in the past with great success https://github.com/danielstern/cyo
Searching "cyoa" on github brings back a tons of results that you can filter through to meet your tech stack needs.
Re: 1977: Zork
#20The old 1970s era Star Trek game is available on iOS; command line interface replaced with a few buttons. It is called Old Trek.