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OS Neutral Telnet/Text adventure games

Astroboy907

Astroboy907

macrumors 65816
Original poster
May 6, 2012
1,387
15
Spaceball One
Anyone play any of these? I've played a few, not to the end yet, but it's fun playing them even though many are older than me by nearly 20 years.

Perhaps we could compile a list of mac/PC text adventure games?

I know of Telnet zork,
and another user posted another Mac-Playable game like this a day or so ago- I'll dig it up and post links when I get time.
 
This might be of interest to you:

http://www.gog.com/game/the_zork_anthology

GOG.com hasn't gotten around to fixing these up with Boxer for OS X but I'd imagine it shouldn't be too hard to do yourself if you feel so inclined.

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Leather Goddesses of Phobos also both by Infocom you may be able to find with Google searches. I didn't try that myself but I imagine those classics are out there somewhere. I'm kind of surprised GOG.com hasn't gotten ahold of them yet either but you never know what issues might exists with original rights holders, etc.

I remember these ones because a good friend of mine played them all back in the day and sometimes I would sit and play with him.
 
Dirtyharry50 said:
This might be of interest to you:

http://www.gog.com/game/the_zork_anthology

GOG.com hasn't gotten around to fixing these up with Boxer for OS X but I'd imagine it shouldn't be too hard to do yourself if you feel so inclined.

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Leather Goddesses of Phobos also both by Infocom you may be able to find with Google searches. I didn't try that myself but I imagine those classics are out there somewhere. I'm kind of surprised GOG.com hasn't gotten ahold of them yet either but you never know what issues might exists with original rights holders, etc.

I remember these ones because a good friend of mine played them all back in the day and sometimes I would sit and play with him.
Click to expand...
I'll sure take a look at these- I think it would be fun to have kind of a library collection of these games with instructions on how to play and that kind of stuff on here. Just my 2c!
 
Infocom

The link given to the Zork Anthology on GOG gets you half a dozen of Infocom's text adventures on OS X - many of the best (and Infocom was the king of text adventure games).

If you've got an iOS device around, then the Lost Treasures of Infocom (also see the publisher's website) will get you Zork I for free, and a $10 in-app purchase will unlock, if I'm counting correctly, 26 more of Infocom's text adventure games - I think that's everything they made except for Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy which is, indeed, sadly trapped by rights issues, and it includes Leather Goddesses of Phobos, which used to be hard to find.

In general, if you search for "Lost Treasures of Infocom" at Amazon (or similar), you'll probably find various versions floating around (hint, track down other names for the same collection in the "see also" or "folks also bought" sections on Amazon), as Infocom's games have been republished in various collections over the years, which have gone out of print, only to be republished again later. If you're handy with poking at files, the needed game files can be extracted from any of these versions (e.g. an old DOS version), and fed into one of the "Z-machine interpreters", like Frotz, to play on almost any platform (seriously, I had these running on my Palm Pilot, back in the day).

What you're looking for, in general, is called Interactive fiction these days (back when we were playing the original Zork, there was just Zork, and Adventure, and no categories - plus, we rode around on dinosaurs). If you google for "Interactive fiction", you'll find the Interactive Fiction Archive and the Interactive Fiction Database - which could keep you reading/exploring for weeks.
 
Carl,

Thanks for the blast from the past. I have fond memories of playing Adventure (Colossal Cave Adventure) while working at DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) back in the early 80's.

I actually downloaded it the other day for my MAC.

Download here----> https://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/21653/adventure

Or from the developers website here----> http://www.lobotomo.com/products/Adventure/index.html

Edit:
I never played any of the Zork series so I just downloaded the Lost Treasures of Infocom from the App Store to give that a try on the iPad.

Thanks,

Jon…
 
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You should be able to find several of these gems out there, or check GOG.

If you find an old "Z machine" file for Planetfall, A Mind Forever Voyaging, Zork, etc. you can fire it right up on your Mac using "Zoom", based on the Frotz Z-Machine interpreter. It's solid and gives you loads of options.
 
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