MAMEWorld Forums - The Loony Bin - Since nobody knows or cares. ..

There is a folder called "VERYLOST" on the Activision release "Masterpieces of Infocom" that contains 3 folders and an ABOUT.TXT.

The txt's I posted were from those folders and the following is the ABOUT.TXT.

Have you ever sneaked into someone's room, read their diary, and then left
without a trace?

That is sort of what this folder is. It contains a series of files downloaded
from the old Infocom UNIX server, which made the journey from Cambridge
to Los Angeles but didn't quite make it to our curennt spiffy world-wide
headquarters.

The Infodope folder contains three issues of Infodope, INFOCOM's in-house
newsletter. The Misc folder contains a great piece about writing Infocom
fiction called The Implementor's Creed, notes on Infocom's favorite pastime,
and notes from a Studio offsite meeting held by Infocom. The Aborted folder
contains notes about several serious and not-so-serious ideas for games
pitched around by the Infocom team.

Digging through this disc reminded of leafing through old newspapers in your
grandmother's attic. You know the kind where they are advertising a 1932 Ford
coupe in cherry condition for only $600? I felt like I had been born too many
years too late to enjoy the best times of the game industry. Even though I
played all of Infocom's text adventures on my Atari 800, I couldn't help but
wish I actually created those games. I hope that everyone who plays these
games will enjoy them as much as I enjoyed putting together this collection.

Jason Kay
Activision Black Operations Team
June 1996

============================================================================
From the Computer of G. Kevin Wilson
SPAG Magazine, Editor and Infocommie
June 19th, 1996.

I'm sure that many of you are old-time Infocommies. I myself got
started on Infocom games (Wishbringer, to be exact) many years ago, when I
got my first IBM PC XT.

I guess some of you are wondering why I enjoy text adventures,
and why I'm still interested in them in this age of 3-D shooters, ray-traced
adventures, and 16-bit sound. It's simple. You can't beat a good story.
If those games would start with a great story and build everything else
around that, they'd be brilliant. Most don't. With a text adventure,
there was nothing else to support the game, you had to have a good story,
or things fell apart. Now, Infocom wasn't always on the mark, but they
hit it pretty consistently, and when they hit it dead center, the results
were unforgettable. That's why you still hear grown adults babbling about
'Hucka-Bucka-Beanstalk' and 'that $%#&*$()! babel fish!'.

I doubt that many of you have heard of SPAG magazine. It's not
available in a printed format, only over the Internet. It's a magazine
about text adventures, but it's not just about the old text adventures.
SPAG magazine has for the past two years been following the efforts of
hobbyists and college students around the world to keep text adventures
alive.

SPAG consists almost exclusively of reader-submitted reviews. The
readers play text adventures, and then share their opinions of them with the
rest of us. You are invited to submit reviews as well. By the way, if you
have Internet access with FTP capability, you're in luck. There's a lot of
material out there to help you write text adventures of your very own.
There's even a newsgroup expressly for authors of text adventures to discuss
tips and tricks. It is: rec.arts.int-fiction (The int-fiction stands for
"interactive fiction",
a phrase used by Infocom to describe the games they produced.)

The FTP site you'll want to visit is: ftp.gmd.de

Look in the /if-archive/ directory. You will find hundreds of text
adventures, solutions, and text adventure design kits. If you look in the
/if-archive/magazines/SPAG/ directory, you'll find all the issues of SPAG
magazine freely available.

If you look in the /if-archive/info/ directory, you'll see several
guides to help you with the less technical and more literary aspects of
making a good game. I myself wrote "Whizzard's Guide to Authoring Text
Adventures." Clunky title, I know, but I think I got my major points across
in it.

Good luck playing these great games, and maybe someday we'll get together
for a game of Hider-and-Seeker.

G. Kevin Wilson
"Whizzard"
[email protected]

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