This morning, a few minutes past midnight, Jason Scott of the Internet Archive dropped a Github full of the original source code to most of the original Infocom text adventure games. (As of 4 hours ago, all of the Infocom text adventure games except for Quarterstaff, which was a Mac-only game not having anything to do with the Infocom Z-machine.)
Included are the unpublished games Restaurant at the End of the Universe (the sequel to Hitchhiker’s Guide the Galaxy), The Abyss (based, it looks like, on the movie), and Checkpoint (a predecessor to Border Zone).
Github link to all the source code
It’s all written in ZIL, which is sort of a mutant form of LISP. More information on ZIL can be found here.
Screenshot from The Abyss running in Frotz.
…
Related to the above news, Ahab over at The Data Driven Gamer has posted an analysis comparing the variation in text across different versions of Zork I across the years.
…
After four years of labor the folks at inkle have released Heaven’s Vault.
It could be described as a history-em-up game where you wander the universe translating an ancient language. It’s currently out on PC and PS4 and will have Mac and iOS releases later this year.
…
Vasilis came out yesterday and is based on events in Ukraine from 2014.
…
Finally, Enrique over at Datalexic published an analysis of all the Twine games released to the IFComp and Spring Thing competitions, with automatic clustering by structural features. (Via @emshort).
Pingback: Lazy Reading for 2019/04/21 – DragonFly BSD Digest