Digital Packrat Opportunity

Checking the Planet IF aggregator weblog might not get me any closer to playing text adventures on a regular basis, but I do see interesting things on it. This morning, I happened to see a first report a digital archiver had put the source code of the canonical Infocom games (and a few incomplete, unreleased projects) on a program repository, and it was the added comment that this was a very grey area of “information archiving” that engaged my digital packrat instincts and had me downloading the files.

I’ve dabbled a bit in Inform 7, which compiles to run on the “Z-Machine” that allowed Infocom’s text adventures to be ported to multiple systems simple and complex, but this programming language was developed after Infocom had gone out of business. ZIL, the language Infocom used, looks much more forbidding and quite distinct from the six previous versions of Inform as well, although there have been recent attempts to recreate it. In reflecting on “possible insights on games I could already play,” I did happen to think of the rediscovery of a long-known-of third version of “Wumpus,” and how source code in BASIC is still more my speed.