Collection Spotlight: The Text Adventures of Infocom

As internet speeds and the storage capacity of our devices have increased, buying physical copies of games has become less and less common, and packaging has become an afterthought. Before the instant gratification of digital downloads, however, physical presentation made all the difference.

Nobody understood this quite as well as Infocom, the company that came to be synonymous with text adventures throughout the 1980s. With Zork, company’s first release, Infocom set the interaction style that would become standard for interactive fiction with a parser that accepted complete sentences and complex commands. Zork became a bestseller in the early 1980s, and Infocom went on to release a host of iconic text adventures spanning a wide range of genres that have had a lasting influence on gaming.

The quality of Infocom’s text adventures themselves were an essential component of the company’s popularity, but boosting that appeal were “feelies,” physical extras packaged with the games that helped bring them to life and sometimes even contained information necessary to complete them. The feelies ranged from paper materials that provided essential information or helped to flesh out the world of the game such as case files, postcards, and the scroll and guild directory from Enchanter pictured below, to more out-there inclusions like the bag of pocket lint that was packaged with Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Infocom’s text adventures were challenging, quickly generating demand for help with navigating their worlds and solving their puzzles that the developers satisfied with supplemental materials. For Zork, Infocom included a note within the game itself that, if picked up and read, would inform players of the availability of a Movement Assistance Planner (M.A.P.) and Hierarchical Information for Novice Treasure Seekers (H.I.N.T.S.) that they could write in to Infocom’s headquarters to buy.

As the demand for hints grew and Mike Dornbrook, the playtester who handled hint requests, left for graduate school, Infocom passed on the job of providing help to stumped gamers to Dornbrook’s newly founded Zork Users Group. Zork Users Group handled maps, hint requests, memorabilia, eventually transitioning the personalized hint service into InvisiClues, hint booklets printed in invisible ink that allowed players to avoid spoilers and reveal only what they needed to know by running over the answers with a special marker.

The Zork map below is Infocom’s first hint-book map, and the only map that predates the Zork Users Group. About 1000 copies of this specific map were printed, and it was redesigned for a second run when the Zork Users Group took over the job of providing hints. The Zork II map was produced by ZUG along with a redesigned version of the original Zork map.

To supplement official maps and hint books, text adventure players also took finding and sharing the best ways to navigate the worlds of interactive fiction into their own hands. Completing a text adventure was described as “solving” it (as opposed to the current computer gaming vernacular of “beating” the game), and particularly invested players would write and share their own solutions to the games for others to reference, often taking being the first to solve the adventure as a point of pride.

Player-created solutions or walkthroughs continue to be a major part of digital gaming – when we’re stumped by a puzzle, seeking effective approaches to a particular difficult boss, or looking to optimize a playthrough from start to finish, we turn to sources like GameFAQs and Steam Guides to help us find the best way forward. The capabilities of modern computers and the prevalence of having multiple devices, as well as the length of games and the consequent length of walkthroughs, mean it’s often more convenient for us to reference these sources straight from the screen. For text adventure players in the 1980s, having a physical document made for a smoother experience. The photos below show sections of two fan-created solution documents for Planetfall and Enchanter, printed for easy reference while exploring.

Due to their popularity and their impact on interactive fiction as a whole, Infocom text adventures are well preserved and easy to find online. For those interested in experiencing some of these adventures for themselves, the Internet Archive has a collection of Infocom text adventures on emulators for a range of systems (and including accurate load times for an authentic experience – if it seems like the game isn’t responding, just wait!) If you give them a shot, the Interactive Fiction Archive has a selection of player-authored solutions here to reference if you get stuck. Good luck and happy adventuring!