mental_floss magazine
SUBSCRIBE >
GIFT SUBSCRIPTIONS >
subscriber services >
Programmer Andy Baio has gotten his hands on a piece of computer gaming history: a backup of game publisher Infocom’s shared network drive from 1989. What’s Infocom, you ask? (At least, you ask this if you’re under a certain age and/or leaned left-of-nerdy in the 80’s….) Infocom is the game company behind classic text adventure like Zork, Leather Goddesses of Phobos, and a little game called The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — which was written with the help of Douglas Adams. A whole generation of nerds tapped away at these games on their 8-bit home computers, discovering rich game worlds through a text-only interface.
So Baio managed to, um, acquire Infocom’s corporate history, code, everything. Here’s how he describes it:
This is one of the most amazing archives I’ve ever seen, a treasure chest documenting the rise and fall of the legendary interactive fiction game company. Among the assets included: design documents, email archives, employee phone numbers, sales figures, internal meeting notes, corporate newsletters, and the source code and game files for every released and unreleased game Infocom made.
So what’s the crown jewel of the stash? Two (very brief) “playable prototypes” of Milliways: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, the unreleased sequel to Infocom’s Hitchhiker’s Guide game. Baio put up a bunch of information about the Milliways game yesterday, and today updated his blog post with a bit more (plus commentary from Infocom staff including Steve Meretzky, co-author with Douglas Adams of the original Hitchhiker’s Guide game). Wow.
So, text gaming nerds, go forth and read all about it. It’s a fascinating (albeit incomplete) story of tumultuous game development in the 80’s. You can also grab the demos from that page, but a bit of technical nerdery is required to actually play them.
Oh now this is going to be some good stuff. Infocom was king for a reason and two prototypes of a sequel to hitch hiker’s guide? Doesn’t get much better than that (ok maybe a sequel to Zork III.)
posted by Kinglink on 4-18-2008 at 5:08 pm
Sadly, I went and played one of the prototypes…it’s pretty minimal. But it is neat that it exists at all. The comments thread on the blog post is almost as long as the article itself, and seems to have stirred up a lot of 20+ year old emotions among the parties involved!
posted by Higgins on 4-18-2008 at 5:30 pm
And yes I know there were sequals to Zork III, ( Beyond zork, Zork zero, and 4 others that don’t carry the name zork (Enchanter, Sorcerer, Wishbringer and Spellbreaker) none of them have quite the same flavor as Zork).
The new “fmv” versions that came out were awful in comparision.
posted by Kinglink on 4-18-2008 at 5:32 pm
Just for reference, there are playable versions of the original Hitchhiker’s game out there on the internet. I can’t remember where any of them are off the top of my head, but I know the one that’s lurking somewhere on the BBC website is illustrated…so it’s not a pure text adventure, but still the same cool game.
posted by Fruppi on 4-18-2008 at 8:25 pm
i remember Leather Goddesses of Phobos…i was in like 5th grade when i discovered it in a batch of floppy discs we got with the Apple IIGS we bought from someone in europe…i have quite missed that game… this is the first time i’ve heard it mentioned since…well since ever…i have never known anyone who has ever heard of it…
posted by stef on 4-18-2008 at 8:27 pm
I printed off a walk-through of the HHGTTG text game, hell bent on getting through the whole thing because I’m a HUGE Hitchhiker’s Guide fan. The game is so damned hard, I couldn’t even beat it with the walk-through! Well…maybe it was really hard, or maybe I’m just an idiot.
posted by Katie on 4-18-2008 at 11:28 pm
Geez, I remember spending too much time playing Infocom games… mostly the Zork series… on my old Commodore 64.
Scary to think that back then, you had to type in a command, hit enter, and then wait for the diskette to access the response before it would appear. It only took a second or so, but it reminds you how much fun can be had with only 64K of memory.
posted by Sandy on 4-19-2008 at 2:30 am