h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Ah yes, it's coming back to me now. Yes, "Escape" was the trigger. "Kill Me" gave a soothing message about how life wasn't all that bad, really, was it...

Most Infocom games had a feature that would respond "suicide is not the answer" to anything along the lines of "kill me." Of course, "eat me" in Zork I was much more humorous.

I liked 'kiss me':

"I'd rather kiss a pig!"
"This is family oriented programming!"

Then, of course, was the infamous "Hello Sailor" line. Only useful at two points in the entire history of Zork....

Or how about Nethack? or ADVENT (adventure)? Or how about MUD and MUD2 (they were the transistion between text games and MUDs, IMHO). Nethack and adventure were created at the same time (roughly) as Zork. Some text adventure scholars claim they, in fact, predated Zork.

Oh, yes - as the article says, the creators of Zork had played ADVENT in the computer lab, and were inspired to write a better text adventure.

I've never heard of Nethack, MUD or MUD2 - but there's several kinds of text adventures out there that pre-date Zork. I remember playing a Star Wars text adventure (could never manage to swing over the bridge), a western text adventure (made gunpower from a pile of manure...) and of course, the quintessential cheesy game: Softporn, with a two-word parser and all caps.

I was mainly interested in Infocom's text adventures because of their innovative parser. I think, although I have no solid evidence, that text 'discussion' games, like Socrates or Lisa - games that allowed you to converse with the computer - were based upon the original Infocom parser.

Love the games... have no time!

- Lentilla

After all, just because Advent came first doesn't make it better. I mean, sure, it's a fun game for someone who's become desensitised to the "guess-the-verb" puzzles from the newer text games (by which I mean 1979 up till right now), but that two-word parser would gets annoying all the time.

Still, I must admire Crowther and Woods for the Dragon puzzle. I never would've solved it if I wasn't the kind of person who did things just to see how amusing my death would be.

I've got some links on my entry (not edited): U208776.

I've got Zork I but I haven't started it yet as I'm writing a walkthrough for Bureaucracy to complement my Hitchhiker's Guide Walkthrough: Check U208776 for details!

:==R9==: