~2 minute readGameBytes
The Lost Treasures of Infocom
Remember when super VGA and 486 processor speeds existed only in your imagination? Or perhaps you recall, fondly or otherwise, those stomach-turning shades of cyan and magenta that graced the lower-than-low-res CGA screens of yesteryear. If you look back fondly on those days (or are intrigued by the lore passed on by PC veterans), we've got the game â well, actually 20 games â for you, priceless relics of the nascent days of PC gaming.
With The Lost Treasures of Infocom, from Activision, a score of classics is backed into one rather weighty box, just waiting to be discovered by a whole new legion of fans. Titles such as Zork, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and Moonmist are among the legends brough back to life after years of absence, and in a world where games almost play themselves, these old do-it-yourself/imagine-it-yourself creations may come as a shock to the uninitiated. It is, however, a pleasant shock.
You won't be bowled over by any technical innovations here. When PC graphics were little more than a joke, Infocom chose to concentrate on creating devilishly clever text adventures. Like a good book, these games are different things to different people. How you play a particular game depends much more on you than on the whims of a game designer, and therein lies the charm and entertainment of the Infocom stable.
As you play these games, though, you'll probably realize that they have much more in common with their graphics-based descendants than you might have imagined. There still remains the major caveat of all adventure gaming, the necessity of looking everywhere and talking to everyone. And running a close second is the ever-popular admonition, to "save often." Of course, lacking graphics, these games take a bit more concentration, because you must create all the scenes in your head.
With all the recent innovations in PC adventuring, it's easy to forget how relatively sophisticated these games are. The text parsers are amazingly good, and harder to trip up than some later, supposedly more advanced graphic adventures. Beyond that, The Lost Treasures of Infocom all share the ability to hook you, so that you may end up playing far into the night.
If it's been a while since you played a "can't switch it off" game, perhaps you should consider your first trip, or maybe a return visit, to the Great Underground Empire, or mysterious Tresyllian Castle. And don't worry about that funny headache â once you get your mental muscles back into shape after those years of neglect, it should go away.
This article appeared in
Game Players PC Entertainment
Jul-Aug 1992
These historical, out-of-print articles and literary works have been GNUSTOed onto InvisiClues.org for academic and research purposes.
