Something very cool is coming…
A collectible book about the first half-century of interactive fiction. Deep dives into fifty text games from Zork to Trade Wars to Fallen London to Lifeline. Sign up to be notified on launch & join the adventure!
(You can also find out more details about the project on my Substack.)
It would have been a safe bet in 1993 to say the text adventure was dead. That year saw the last release of a traditional parser game by a mainstream publisher: Legend Entertainment’s Gateway II: Homeworld, a sequel only greenlit because the original had sold unexpectedly well. But the unlikely success was not repeated. The bestselling games of the year would be CD-ROM extravaganzas like Myst and The Seventh Guest loaded with animations, music, voice acting, and video. Infocom — once the king of interactive story — was out of business, its lauded text games now in the remainder bin if they could still be found at all. It did not seem likely the genre they helped popularize would ever come back.
Continue reading at the home of my new blog series, “50 Years of Text Games.”
