Anyone Still Play Text Adventure Games?

Does anyone still play text adventure games? (I guess the new term is "Interactive Fiction".) I might be the only one here. ;-)

I've only played a handful of them, so I guess I'm still a newbie of sorts.

I did notice that the winners of the IFComp 2021 have been announced:

https://ifcomp.org/comp/2021

I guess I *am* the only one here, haha.

I didn't even know that text adventure games ever existed until recently; I completely missed out on these games during their heyday in the '80s. Strangely enough, I find the history of text adventure games just about as interesting as actually playing the games. Here's a couple of videos that impressed me.

The first one is GET LAMP: The Text Adventure Documentary:

The second video is Infocom: The Documentary:

As a bonus, the full interviews used in the first video are available on the Internet Archive as The GET LAMP Interview Archives:

https://archive.org/details/getlamp-interviews

That's impressive - I've heard that the Zorks are pretty unforgiving. As far as the Infocom games, I've only played the easy Wishbringer and half of Planetfall. A non-Infocom game that I thought was hilarious is Lost Pig. https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=mohwfk47yjzii14w

I remember playing one of the first text adventure games posted on to the web that got really big.

If anyone wants to try Lost Pig, the Gargoyle interpreter is a good choice to run it. Gargoyle is available for all three platforms. (The Linux version is the older ver 2011.1, but it's also available in my Linux repository.)

http://ccxvii.net/gargoyle/

https://github.com/garglk/garglk/releases

Well, I have my hands full (and more) with Dwarf Fortress (and finishing Planetfall one of these days), but I'll add Brogue to my "someday" list. I checked, and the Brogue Community Edition is available on Github and as a flatpak in my Linux repository. Yay!

I played zork recently it fun

It's*

Was it maybe Colossal Cave Adventure? (It also went by a few other names - ADVENT, Colossal Cave, and Adventure.)

I haven't played that one, but what is fascinating is that the game is based on a real cave in Kentucky (as described in the GET LAMP documentary).

I think it was that one.

For info, here's the IFDB entry for Adventure, in a huge number of formats.

https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=fft6pu91j85y4acv

Dang, I've been reading some history and watching video footage of people going into the Bedquilt cave in Kentucky (the one used as a model for Adventure). Now I feel like I have to play Adventure, even though the game is unfair in a number of ways.

So I'm thinking my to-do list is:

1) Continue with Dwarf Fortress until I'm more comfortable with it.

2) Finish up Planetfall.

3) Play some version of Adventure - either the original, or the reworked Level 9 version.

With the limited time I have available, those three should take me a few years, lol.