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FUN AND GAMES
Running classic interactive text adventures on your Palm device
By Dan Amrich
Ask any fan of video and computer games, and he or she will tell you: it's all about the game play. Graphics and sound take a back seat to how much fun it is to interact with the game's fake universe. How easy is it for you to forget about the real world once you're there? Good game play makes good games, and a well-designed and executed computer game will be captivating--no matter what hardware it runs on.
No games better illustrated this principle than the interactive fiction games (sometimes shortened as "IF," but even better known as merely "text adventures") created by Infocom in the early 1980s. Infocom releases like Zork (shown in Figure A), The Witness, and Enchanter featured no graphics at all--just detailed prose, spitting out descriptions of magical realms, hardened gumshoes, and futuristic worlds, spanning all genres of storytelling.
FIGURE A
 
This rare box art from the original Zork was all the game ever offered in terms of graphics! Take a gander at that ancient TRS-80 logo! Roll over picture for a larger image.
A simple, two-word parser gave you all the freedom you'd need. Typing in basic phrases like "go east," "take sword," "light match," and "get away" let you, the player, star in your own book, using only text and imagination to tell the story. Fancy graphics need not apply.
Of course, graphics not only held their ground, they ultimately conquered the text adventure. Despite successes like the fantasy-based Zork trilogy, the murder mystery Deadline, the risque B-movie send-up Leather Goddesses of Phobos, and an interactive version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (shown in Figure B) written by Douglas Adams himself, interactive fiction eventually fell out of vogue. Infocom was acquired by Activision and attempted to update their games with graphics, but it spoiled the product and flopped at retail.
FIGURE B
 
Wacky sci-fi demigod Douglas Adams wrote the interactive version of Hitchhiker's Guide himself. Roll over picture for a larger image.
Old software never dies
By the late 80's, the golden age was over and these great old games were presumed lost for good. Yet, old software never dies, folks. It just gets emulated. What better fit for Palm entertainment than interactive fiction? Its requirements are basic. Rudimentary interface? Check. Text input and output? No problem. Small program size? Yes, please. In hindsight, it almost seems like destiny; after all, two of Infocom's founders wrote "How to Fit a Large Program Into a Small Machine" for Creative Computing in July 1980. They never knew just how small the machines would get. [And making history weirder yet, your esteemed editor-in-chief was an editor for Creative Computing during that very summer way back when.--DG].
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