Infocom has a special place in my heart.
Meh, I'm being half tongue-in-cheek, but it does. I had ALL their titles, and solved most of them with my best friends Terry and Dave.
We loved them so much, we'd buy each new title the very first day they were available. We would brainstorm and consternate over how to get past various solutions... and I remember the heartbreak the time Floyd died, giving his life to save mine.
Quote:
"Looks dangerous in there," says Floyd. "I don't think you should go inside." He peers in again. "We'll need card there to fix computer. Hmmm... I know! Floyd will get card. Robots are tough. Nothing can hurt robots. You open the door, then Floyd will rush in. Then you close door. When Floyd knocks, open door again. Okay? Go!" Floyd's voice trembles slightly as he waits for you to open the door.
> OPEN THE DOOR
"The door opens and Floyd, pausing only for the briefest moment, plunges into the Bio Lab. Immediately, he is set upon by hideous, mutated monsters! More are heading straight toward the open door! Floyd shrieks and yells to you to close the door."
> CLOSE THE DOOR
From within the lab you hear ferocious growlings, the sounds of a skirmish, and then a high-pitched metallic scream!
> WAIT
Time passes...
You hear, slightly muffled by the door, three fast knocks, followed by the distinctive sound of tearing metal.
> OPEN THE DOOR
Floyd stumbles out of the Bio Lab, clutching the mini-booth card. The mutations rush toward the open doorway!
> CLOSE THE DOOR
And not a moment too soon! You hear a pounding from the door as the monsters within vent their frustration at losing their prey.
Floyd staggers to the ground, dropping the mini card. He is badly torn apart, with loose wires and broken circuits everywhere. Oil flows from his lubrication system. He obviously has only moments to live.
You drop to your knees and cradle Floyd's head in your lap. Floyd looks up at his friend with half-open eyes. "Floyd did it ... got card. Floyd a good friend, huh?" Quietly, you sing Floyd's favorite song, the Ballad of the Starcrossed Miner: ....
As you finish the last verse, Floyd smiles with contentment, and then his eyes close as his head rolls to one side. You sit in silence for a moment, in memory of a brave friend who gave his life so that you might live."
Ugh. I actually cried, and was actually depressed for a day over it. Al three of us were in shock.
And when the wait for a new title got too unbearable, we even wrote our own text adventures on my Commadore 64. We developed our own text recognition program to do it and everything, breaking the sentence down into words by looking for spaces, then comparing the first four letters of every word to a database blah blah blah... it worked as good as Infocoms, limited only by the size and complexity of the data base you created. Our adventure was based in our neighborhood and school, you could get on the school bus and ride to it to school etc. I also remember having to find your locker combination to get into the locker... you could do almost anything nasty to the principal when you encountered him too.... he got the brunt of all our adolescent angst... not much else do I recall. Its a shame nothing we ever made is still around... would have been great memories, especially since Terry has already passed away (can you believe that, I'm already to that age where old friends are already gone). Working FOR Infocom was a dream of ours as kids, but then the text-based adventures added graphics as computers got "better", which pretty much ruined the genre in my opinion. We bought ONE title with pictures and graphics (I forget which title that was), but it wasn't the same, and my interest faded in the subject after that. Why none of the three of us went into computer related jobs is bizarre, considering how geeked we were about them as kids.
So, yeah, I enjoyed your post. Anything Infocom is kewl to me.
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