Talk to any text adventure game player and they will start to wax nostalgic about a golden age. In the eighties there was a company called Infocom which was founded on campus at MIT. Infocom survived little more than five years, before the arrival of graphics adventures critically reduced the size of the market for text adventures. For a while their games were in limbo but then Mediagenic, trading as Activision, bought the rights to all their games. Mediagenic/Activision subsequently became involved in a losing legal brawl with Magnavox (Phillips) but were rescued by The Disc Company who retained both the Activision and the Infocom names. The new Activision has gathered all twenty of these games into a single package as The Lost Treasures of Infocom. The package includes a full hint book and maps.
Zork was another fantasy adventure. It contained witty references to Adventure and introduced the grue to gaming vocabulary. The game is set in the remains of a Great Underground Empire called Quendor. The object of the game is to locate the empire's treasures and put them in a trophy case. A thief has the same idea and will pick up and move items that the player has seen but not taken, all of which makes mapping quite eventful.
Zork was followed by two sequels: Beyond Zork was also about the lands of Quendor, but was written by Brian Moriarty who went on to become the driving force behind Lucasfilm Games. Moriarty is more literate than his colleagues and this shows in his games. Beyond Zork was the first Infocom game in which a player could define their character in terms of six attributes just as one does in role-playing games. The game was awash with cross-references to other Infocom products.
The last Zork game was a prequel from Steve Meretzky. Zork Zero was set at the time of the fall of the Great Underground Empire and the player can contribute to its downfall. The intermittent attention of the Court Jester lends the game the absurdity that we know expect from the man who is currently the star in the crown of Legend Software.
Marc Blank's next project was a unique mystery. A wealthy industrialist appears to have committed suicide within his locked library but his attorney suspects murder. The player is the Chief of Detectives asked to investigate the case and there are only twelve hours in which to solve the case. Every command takes at least one minute. The player has a Deadline.
Another Infocom detective mystery with a twelve-hour deadline was Stu Galley's Witness. Galley is another MIT graduate and founder of Infocom. In Witness the player must find the killers of Bob Lundstrom, who had sought police protection after receiving phoned death threats.
Dave Lebling also wrote a third deadlined murder mystery game but he had the police as supporting characters. In Suspect the main protagonist is a journalist who is framed for murder. Mysteries are ideal material for adventure games but they do not have to involve murder. Ballyhoo was set in a circus where the owner's daughter has been kidnapped and Moonmist is a combined ghost story and treasure hunt.
Lurking Horror is a high technology horror story by Dave Lebling. It is set on a college campus that has been snowed in. As usual it is liberally peppered with self-referential Infocom jokes. The game's title is derived from the description of a grue and the name of the college is another Infocom in-joke.
Planetfall and Stationfall were two more science fiction games. Both were mock heroic space opera material from Meretzky. In the first game the player is forced to abandon a space ship and crash on the mysterious planet of Resida. Solving the planet's secret and saving it from oblivion leads to promotion for the second game. Starcross was Lebling's science fiction story for Infocom. Two hundred years hence a black hole miner will encounter a giant space ship from beyond our solar system.
To many adventure game players the pinnacle of Infocom's achievement was Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. This was written by Meretzky with Douglas Adams and was derived from the eponymous cult radio and television series and is a surreal masterpiece.
The twenty games in the anthology are not a complete collection and they are not the best twenty but almost any Infocom game is preferable to almost any other text adventure. Activision will also be publishing a second bundle to complete the collection, but in the meantime, this is the best value that obtainable from any box of games outside a public domain library.
A budget version of Leather Goddesses of Phobos was published in 1990 by Virgin Games (UK only). This edition was very cheap but did not contain any of the smart packaging. It did include on-line hints, however, and the story itself remained unchanged. The entire game filled half a 360K floppy disk but the challenge lasted for days.
It is now 1956. The leather Goddesses of Phobos have decided to use the Solar System's tenth planet, Planet X, as their base for their latest assault on Earth. One of the technologically advanced inhabitants of Planet X comes to Earth to seek help but his spaceship crashes near the home of Zeke Zarmen, son of Trent. Zeke is friendly with Lydia Sandler, daughter of an astronomer who recently discovered Planet X. They are friendly towards the alien but the authorities take a more belligerent attitude.
The player can be male, female or alien by choosing Zeke, Lydia Barthgub el Nikki-Nikki, Son of Jelgobar el Zayda-Zayda. The objective is to get Barthgub and his spaceship fir to travel, return to Planet X and then on to Phobos to stick a second spanner in the works of the leather Goddesses.
The user interface is a deceptively simple intelligent cursor which indicates how the player may interact with the indicated object. The clear graphics and the quality of the animation make this very simple to use. Choosing to talk to a character changes the interface. The screen fills with a head shot and a column of icons for greeting, topics to discuss and interpersonal activities. The speech is well performed and the sound is high quality. The voices show neat characterization and I particularly enjoyed listening to Barth struggle with human language.
As a reviewer I have an unusually broad range of hardware. Part of my set-up is a stereo mixer to control the output from my various sound devices. Most people only have one sound device, however, even though an increasing number of games use two. Infocom have handled this excellently with this game. The package includes a Life Size Sound Enhancer which runs off a printer port in the same way as the Disney Sound Source. The digitized sound from this is quite acceptable and enables one-card players to use their original card for the music. The music is the standard adventure implementation of a tune per room. The melodies are neither irritating nor remarkable, but they cut abruptly as the player moves from place to place.
LGOP2 feels like the offspring of Legend's Spellcasting series and Accolade's Les Manley series. It is funny and entertaining but it lacks the charm that it needs to compensate for its lack of challenge. The label that refuses to die continues on its merry way then, even if some of the old magic has been lost. Just how permanent this loss is we'll be able to gauge better when Activision release Return to Zork next year.
Thanks to Warwick Annear for transcribing and donating this article.