Excerpt from Douglas Adams website, home of the most popular Infocom text-based game of all time. Do you remember when computer games didn’t have graphics; Or at least they couldn’t have graphics and sound at the same time. They certainly couldn’t have graphics, sound and enough content to keep even a human being amused for more than a few minutes. So they had text. This was radical – a computer game you could control by typing in commands. The game would then respond to your commands with a breathtakingly prescient understanding of your intent; Or not. Usually not – the early text parsers (circa 1977) weren’t that bright. But, as long as you limited yourself to what the game understood and the game designers wrote creatively enough to misunderstand you in a humorous and entertaining fashion, it all worked. It therefore stands to reason that any game which combined a really good programmer with a really good writer was likely to do well. So when Steve Meretzky of Infocom got together with Douglas Adams to create a game based around the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the result was never going to be less than interesting and more than likely insane. So it proved – the Hitchhiker’s Guide adventure game was one of the best-selling games of its era, selling some 350,000 copies. In 1984.
If you’ve read this far, congratulations, you clearly have one of the necessary requirements to play the actual game online. May I suggest the BBC’s rather excellent 20th Anniversary Edition? It uses Flash, allows you to save games, and sports some rather natty illustrations by Rod Lord – creator of the guide graphics for the BBC TV series. Believe it or not, the game IS STILL insanely popular. I want to share another big red button as well. <--- IF you visited, Annoying, huh? Keep going for Choice of Dragons. --->
Stage right, enter Choice of Games! I first ran across these guys on the droid “Market” as an application for my phone. Choice of the Dragon was this text-based adventure that reminded me of the old flip book adventures. It was also reminiscent of the Infocom games from the 80′s that I played on the speedy Commodore 64 and Amiga 128. A couple of differences, multiple choice selections and ease of use. The writing was excellent, the choices were humorous and the story was intriguing. The game keeps “stats” for my dragon and told me all about my “dragon’s” personality. I was so sold on the developers that I looked them up online. Behold, they are online and have a web version. As of 04/01/2010, they just added yet another adventure called Choice of Broadsides. I am sure it will be as entertaining as the one on my droid. Either way, sailing is in the forecast this weekend as I take on the mighty swashbucklers and Choice of Broadsides this weekend.
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