Games that I felt advanced the state of things (note: an important gap in my knowledge of the early era is that I’ve never played any Magnetic Scrolls/Level 9 games – they were part of a parallel British tradition that never penetrated the awareness of my friends and I in the early '80s which I have always found odd – in fact I’d love it if someone could point out for me which are the ‘important’ early British games, as below)…
1977…
Adventure (early 1977) is the best place to start for seeking out “the roots of video games” in IF form. (If you’re playing Hunt the Wumpus then I totally believe that is your goal, for who would play Hunt the Wumpus today for any reason other than research?)
Dungeon (late 1977) – this is the original mainframe version of the Zork games and contains content that was later split into Zork I, II, and III in order to fit onto personal computers. It’s quite different from the later versions particularly in parser design, so if tracing the development of that is your goal, Dungeon is an important data point.
1978…
Adventureland – this is a Scott Adams game and not playable in Gargoyle, but if you can find a way to play this I would. Adventureland is older than anything released on a personal computer by Infocom!
1978 is also the year Space Invaders was released in the arcades. Space Invaders changed everything. It represents the refinement of the ideas that had been previously explored in many variations in arcade after arcade. But it wasn’t until Space Invaders that they realised the extreme importance of preserving the consequences of player choices on the playing field as long as possible, which is also an insight very relevant to IF but which many IF authors did not absorb (and some still haven’t). It was that bit of knowledge about what to do with player choice (i.e. do not dispose of it in mere seconds, that’s a waste of player interest) that sparked the massive growth of the video game craze and stuff like Pac Man. So this is an important bit of study even for those only interested in narrative games. Text adventures (and adventure games in general) would not reach the level of saturation of the experimental field seen in the arcades of the '70s for years afterward, so really the early arcades are where you need to go to truly understand the early evolution of video games, including narrative games, and how they should handle player choice. But I’ll stick to text adventures…
1980…
Zork I – the real prototype for almost everything that came afterward in single-player parser-based IF. Adventure was a proof-of-concept. Zork I established the actual specific parser conventions in the forms that they still exist today.
1981…
Zork II – skip it
1982…
Deadline – the first serious-minded experiment in actual narrative fiction. Deadline is probably the first ‘interactive fiction’ I’m aware of that is truly deserving of that label. It attempted to bend the freshly-minted conventions of IF to apply to a different kind of storytelling.
Starcross – was the first experiment of a different kind: rather than bend the interface to fit a different story we could take more seriously (ACCUSE BUTLER), instead it found a serious environment (exploring an abandoned alien space vessel) that would naturally line-up with the pre-existing Zork-style interface. The result is something like Rendezvous with Rama. The interesting thing is, the Starcross experiment was much more successful than the Deadline experiment, if you measure success in terms of numbers of imitators. There were a few more Deadline-like games that tried to stretch the bounds of the IF interface, but there were THOUSANDS MORE Starcross-like games that chose their stories to fit their interface instead of vice versa. In a sense, after Starcross every adventure story became a retelling of Rendezvous with Rama. (Example: isn’t that exactly what Myst is?) So Starcross is the first of many, many ‘Rama’ games and it’s still the most ‘faithful’. 8) The Starcross style of serious storytelling is ascendant still to this day, although that hegemony has been fraying. (P.S. Starcross is fairly expert level or at least advanced in puzzle difficulty.)
1983…
Enchanter – This time Rama is a castle and we return to the Zork style universe, only taken more seriously, so this game is historically interesting in that respect – it plays like a fusion of Zork and Starcross.
Planetfall – First truly emotionally compelling NPC. Every story game designer with an interest in the history of their craft should have played this game.
Suspended – A very fascinating experiment (not really pursued afterward by any other authors) in which you control six different robots each with a different sensory apparatus. This is a difficult, complex game! Why was this type of brain-switching not further pursued? Was it because the POV-switch was clunky and restrictive (true) or was it because making the subjects robots didn’t really allow the idea to stretch its wings into differing emotional states rather than just sight/hearing/touch (also true)?
1984…
Cutthroats – Mostly interesting for cluing me into what could be done with multiple NPCs independently going about their daily routines which involve clandestine meetings with each other to which you may or may not manage to bear witness depending on your actions. I feel Cutthroats did this more effectively than the actual detective games that should have done this, like Deadline and Witness, mostly because the suspense was better handled – I really wanted to know what would happen when various characters ran into each other. The Infocom detective stories mostly failed because the interface experiments interfered with rathr than enhanced the narrative. (Don’t get me started on the ASK/TELL ABOUT interface.) Cutthroats contains some of the elements of the detective stories without their interface weakness.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – This one is just here to demonstrate the amazing suitability of interactive fiction to stories that are playful with language. (One look at your inventory in this game is enough to see how well the two dovetail.) It’s also the first time I saw IF mechanics twisted and bent to fold not-necessarily-IF situations that were taken from a novel – the results are very interesting and unusual puzzle types.
1985…
A Mind Forever Voyaging – The first masterpiece of interactive fiction, in my book. AMFV is a serious work of science fiction regardless of its nature as a game. And it’s the closest thing Infocom ever made to sandbox game, unless you count Quarterstaff which is mostly graphical.
1986…
Trinity – Possibly as interesting a work of science fiction as A Mind Forever Voyaging, but Trinity is far better rooted in the prevailing interactive style. It is endlessly fascinating to compare AMFV and Trinity because they are both serious and mature works but they have widely divergent relationships to the prevailing conventions of IF – AMFV almost entirely rejecting them, but Trinity embracing them with extraordinary maturity and grace. And both these conflicting visions for the future of a medium came out of the same company about a year apart – it’s amazing. This is Infocom at the top of its game – it has never got this good again in the commercial realm.
Post-1990…
Curses was the first homebrew game based on Infocom’s z-machine, of significant size. There were a bunch of TADS experiments before this (in fact there were MANY homebrew game systems before this), but I never got too into homebrew (besides Eamon games) before Curses. Anyway in this early era, most of the stuff was attempts to recapture the glory of Infocom, so there was a lot of recreation of prior advances, and very little experimentation with form. As a result, the earliest homebrew stuff is much less interesting to me personally, although Curses is an important exception. It’s a difficult game but it starts out easy and has a nice, gradual upramp in puzzle complexity. Graham Nelson’s prose style is whimsical yet economical and restrained. He did an amazing job on several levels, and wrote a general-purpose compiler too; the man is a genius. I wish he’d write more games!
Other homebrew games since that I feel introduced me to important new ideas in design that I don’t recall seeing elsewhere quite as early…
A Change in the Weather – Moving beyond the rigidity of environment.
Jigsaw – interesting handling of protagonist. This is a very difficult game.
Delusions – virtual environment in a text environment.
I-0 – one of the first experiments with not just retelling Rendezvous with Rama.
The Edifice – Rendezvous with Rama in linguistic form. Fascinating use of medium.
The rest I have to add are more recent and are generally discussed much more frequently around here…
Spider and Web
Photopia
Galatea
Shade
Lost Pig
Violet
Heliopause (I forget the full name of this one but it in form it was very, very interesting)
That last run is pretty sketchy and missing I am sure LOTS more good stuff written more recently – I kind of dropped out of awareness of the community in the 2000s so there was close-to-ten-year gap where I didn’t really play anything.
Hope all that helps.
Paul.