Ah, wow, memory lane.
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MaxiJogos, ERBE. A collection of games, each game (floppy disk version always) accompanied by an A4 booklet with information about the game, the manual, and often the walkthrough.
This was the first I actually knew of adventure games. I saw the Indy 3 one, the one which went “What would YOU do if you were Indiana Jones?”. As it happens, my mother did have an IBM PC at the time, and I was enough of a pest even as a kid to get it bought for me. I thought it was a film, at first. I was NOT disappointed when I found out what it actually was.
At least 50% of that collection was adventure games, and the really good stuff. Alongside Lotus and Links and Zool and Trolls you had Monkey Island 1, King’s Quest 5, Police Quest 3, Larry 1, Maniac Mansion, Loom, even the ones like Operation Stealth and Future Wars and Cruise For A Corpse.
Beautiful stuff. I played all of them with the walkthrough, I thought that WAS how you played it. The only thing I regret about it all is having had lots of games spoiled for me. But, it got me thinking in “adventure game” ways without any frustration, so hey!
Crazy days. I could spend up to an hour fiddling with the configuration, trying very hard to get the mouse AND the soundblaster working (under DOS, most of these games. Even if there WERE win versions available they looked better under DOS). It was a triumph to hear that soundtrack blasting away! But I still remember, way too vividly, the theme of Indy 3 and Monkey Island 1 in the PC Speaker… and I loved it!
Once my love for adventure games was well and truly underway, I bought the Roberta Williams Anthology, and had my first contact with the parser. Or maybe it was with the Police Quest anthology?.. the Space Quest one?.. the Leisure Suit Larry one?.. I forget. BUT, It was the coolest thing I’d ever seen! An interface that allowed for so much more versatility than the mouse!
Then there were some Shareware CDs floating around, some of them with adventure games. Doppy and Pru, Crypt, T-Zero… ah, the memories.
I was blown away when I got The Zork Anthology (I’m big on anthologies) and played the first Zork game. It was a magnitude of quality I’d never seen before. It got me involved the way no other text adventure had.
My first real experience with a text aventure game, maybe even before Zork, was an “adventure starter pack” that included Theater, Kissing the Budha’s Feet, The Lesson of the Tortoise, and some others. I remember playing Babel around this time too, but that one blew me away more than Zork so I think it came after.
Mind, all of this was before I was 13. Then there was a cycle of playing different genres, a decade where I didn’t touch IF but gorged on graphical adventures, and right now I still play the occasional graphic adventure but I’m mostly over-saturated (in a good way!) with IF.
Ah, nostalgia.
EDIT - All the MaxiJogos games that COULD be in Spanish WERE in Spanish. I’d almost forgotten about that. It was ages before I found out what “sin embargo” meant.
EDIT 2 - Eeek. I remember I actually printed out all the feelies that came with Zork Zero. There was one that was supposed to be a scrap of parchment; I printed it out, then proceeded to thrash it and burn it at the edges and rub it with coffee until it looked as old as it should look.
This thread is an unholy Pandora’s Box.
EDIT 3 - For anyone who’s been trying to read this, I’m done editing and adding (eddinting?)