Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

Congrats, you survived 2025! (Mostly. As of this writing, still a little time left.)

I’ve already done a review roughly mid-year because I “finished” 1982; you can read about that at All the Adventures up to 1982 in Review.

For 2025 as a whole I managed to write about 85 games. This includes some older ones that I’ve been able to loop back to: Kim-Venture where an entire adventure somehow fits on a 6-character display (one that had been on my queue for a while but had been giving me technical difficulty). SVHA Adventure was newly-discovered by the efforts of Robert Robichaud (and is one game I might come back to, as the no-save-game aspect combined with extremely deadly dwarves made it too hard to finish).

I also looped back to 1980 for The Troll Hole Adventure, which was one of my most popular posts due to a combination of the funny title and the bizarro Interact computer.

1981 was re-visited with the unusual first person adventure The Maze, the designed-from-another-universe Tiny Adventure (with a very long historical backstory), the historical oddity Citadel (from a Danish author, but written in English) and the children’s game Deliver the Cake.

1982 is where things get out of hand. I’ll point to Arsène Larcin (a French game from Quebec) and The Hobbit (with a large slice of Australian history) as being popular before I broke to 1983, although after the break I also ended up getting to Skatte Jagt (first Danish adventure), Fairytale (a “children’s game” written for a competition), Takara Building Adventure Part 1 (one of the earliest Japanese adventures) and Pillage Village (an undocumented Apple II game that slipped the net where one of the authors went on to write for Origin).

(The reason I can miss a game varies a lot. In general I take the existing lists of games from Mobygames and CASA and then supplmenet them with a lot of research, but any games that aren’t on either of those sources at the time I start the year can easily go missing. For the games above, Skatte Jagt didn’t have a year attached until I puzzled it out, Fairytale I had on a different year due to the original being lost, Takara was a “lost game” only recently dumped, and Pillage Village simply slipped the net and is still only available in a “warez” version.)

Finally, I did get to a fair number of 1983 games, like the wildly ambitious Ring Quest which includes all of the Lord of the Rings on one giant map, The Palms which was the first Japanese adventure solely available on disk, Ringen which was another lost game (more Tolkien, but in Norwegian), The Dark Crystal which adapted the movie (and I give the history of the movie and game simultaneously), Puzzle Adventure which was all about Japanese wordplay combined with ancient poetry, Madhouse which was a “fangame” for the Deathmaze 5000/Asylum series nobody even remembered existed, and Valley of the Kings which was (again) thought long-lost.

Happy New Year and all that.

There’s quite a few more games (and histories about the games) than that and I’d recommend checking the All the Adventures list if you’ve built up a reading backlog.

(Random survey question: how do people read my blog anyway? I test any new posts on both computer and on phone, and I also test things on Reader.)

As far as what’s coming up for 2026 goes, it’s hard to say with my schedule, as people keep discovering things. Loosely, I know I have (not in this order)

• a completely unknown and gigantic game recovered from a Data General drive with the scale/scope of Warp/Ferret
• another “contest” game like Krakit and Alkemstone, but this time where it’s real buried treasure and the treasure is still out there
• The Coveted Mirror
• Twin Kingdom Valley
• At least five Japanese games (I’m now up to ~50 for 1983 based on my research so I need to keep playing them regularly)
• And one thing I’m keeping under my hat until the time comes.

My deepest thanks to everyone who contributed comments and helped in other ways. The idea of the blog being a collaborative effort was baked into the very title, so I appreciate all of you.