Here is the game description from the interactive fiction database.
Plot : Anglophone Atlantis has been an independent nation since an April day in 1822, when a well-aimed shot from their depluralizing cannon reduced the British colonizing fleet to one ship.
Since then, Atlantis has been the world’s greatest center for linguistic manipulation, designing letter inserters, word synthesizers, the diminutive affixer, and a host of other tools for converting one thing to another. Inventors worldwide pay heavily for that technology, which is where a smuggler and industrial espionage agent such as yourself can really clean up.
Unfortunately, the Bureau of Orthography has taken a serious interest in your activities lately. Your face has been recorded and your cover is blown.
Your remaining assets: about eight more hours of a national holiday that’s spreading the police thin; the most inconvenient damn disguise you’ve ever worn in your life; and one full-alphabet letter remover.
Hadean Lands is mine, personally, I really don’t like surrealist games, and not all of plotkin’s games are my thing, but this one absolutely is, both because of the story, which is kind of interesting, the world building, the mechanics, the craft, and just, yeah, it’s so much fun to just play with. I also have a heavy fondness for Steve Meretzky’s A mind forever voyaging, not because I agree with the authors politics, very much the opposite, but because he was one of the first to use interactive fiction for more than just a game, more than just a story, something beyond that. He wanted to make a story that would resonate, that would send a message, that would do more than just the medium, with what little resources and memory was available to him, and although I don’t think he quite succeeded, he did the best he possibly could have with what he had and the result speaks for itself
I sometimes wonder what would’ve happened if infocom hadn’t made their fatal mistake of throwing so much at cornerstone, which directly led to the Activision acquisition and eventually the companies break up. I don’t think infocom could exist today, generally interactive fiction isn’t something you can produce commercially anymore, COG is the rare example of you being able to do that, but maybe they could’ve stuck around longer, maybe they could’ve been able to use the increase in device memory and processing power to make new systems and new games, it’s a massive what if for me
Very much so. I’m friends with a few old Infocom hands and it’s always bittersweet to hear the old stories. The ending of the 80’s/beginning of the 90’s was really a turning point where previously developer-friendly publishers like Activision and EA started shifting into the versions we know today, something I’ve always considered an irony considering how Activision started. As for EA, my feeling is that Brian Fargo took that spirit when he spun off Interplay into publishing, and EA just rolled toward its fate after Trip Hawkins moved on.
i haven’t finished any parser games yet (i’ve had a tricky time figuring out how to work the mechanics so i keep pausing, then forgetting to come back to them), but i liked what i’ve played so far of Spider and Web! someday i want to devote some time to playing parser-style stuff, but haven’t gotten around to it yet. i struggle with lateral thinking type stuff, so they’re tricky for me to figure out so far. hopefully i’ll get the hang of them in time though!
A little selection of some I’m fond of: Toby’s Nose and Eat Me by Chandler Groover, Galatea by Emily Short, Take and Laid Off From The Synesthesia Factory by Katherine Morayati, Gun Mute by CEJ Pacian, Make It Good by Jon Ingold.
Galatea by Emily Short is also one of my favorite of all time. She also happens to work on if the top interactive fiction games of all time and one of the only browser based ones to succeed fallen London.
Do you know what happened to the blood and laurels game? It was a game by her on this engine called versu and it was suppose to have these dynamic a.i NPCs . This was before chatgpt even went public. I can’t find the game anywhere online not any other games made in this engine .
I actually think parser games could stayed mainstream had they made the parser style games less annoying. i played several where the only commands it responds to is west,east,north,south etc but that has nothing to do with the actual topic in the game . I wish they made them so it responded to a wider range of commands .
I actually like parser games better than choice based interactive fiction. For one several of the writers had have some game design/ programming experience and it shows in the creation of the game. Also i find the content better written. In the choice based space it seems like slot writers from fanfiction , anime , and ya spaces and I’m generally not fan of that style writing at all . I can tolerate anime but have no desire to see someone do anime tropes in written form. I feel like parser based if they got rid of the parser and added a few more game mechanics alot of them could put sell the choice based counterparts. Mind you the number criticism I see of choice based games is that alot of them don’t feel like games at all .
Also online I notice dungeon crawling and rogue like text based games are tend to have significantly more reviews and downloads than choice based story games . I found one that over 1000 different endings , a full combat system etc . The Android store has several of these type games the difference in downloads between them and the story based ones is massive and even when it’s not they tend to be higher rated with better reviews . Because in a story based game I’m judging your writing and if I don’t like I’m gonna rate it poorly this isn’t true of games that don’t try and be stories .
As far as I know it unfortunately wasn’t able to be preserved due to a combination of licencing and device/operating system compatibility - a big shame, as Versu was some really innovative narrative systems design.
It really was . So I’m guessing nobody tried to make an alternative ? from how it was explained versu could been a game changer in the interactive fiction space .
It seems every time there is cool interactive game engine or space they seem to go out out of business in like less than 2 years .
That’s the main aspect where CoG is such a unicorn – more than a decade as a profitable and growing company, in a space where most game companies crash and burn, or turn into slop factories.
From your other posts, I guess you think CoG has already picked the latter route. Out of curiosity, have you tried Choice of Rebels? I normally don’t pitch my own work, but I’m always up for a critical perspective, and I know I can count on you to not pull your punches if you don’t like either the writing or the mechanics. Reply on my thread if you like, so as not to derail this one.
Anyway, I’m glad that bouncing off intfiction got you interested in what they’re doing in the parser space. Like Sujan says, you should give Hadean Lands a try – it’s got tougher puzzles than Counterfeit Monkey, but it’s one of the more commercially successful games to come out of the intfiction community.
Yes I played a lot of old parser IG games in the past during my HS time like 16 years ago but I always needed a guide since I’m bad at solving puzzles and I just wanted to see the different reactions.
I used to be into the IF Comp until they started allowing AI gen covers and I stopped caring much nowadays.
I loved – and I still love – all the old Infocom games. I still have my Commodore-128 (!) and all my old disks, and I have, and regularly play, in no particular order…
Zork I
Zork II
Planetfall
Stationfall
Lurking Horror
Hitchhiker’s Guide
Leather Goddesses Of Phobos
Wishbringer
Starcross
Seastalker
Of course, I think bureaucracy is the most awesome part of any spec-fic worldbulding; how could I not love it?
Other parser games I’ve enjoyed include Eat Me, Counterfeit Monkey, Make It Good, and The Big Sleaze.
As much as I like choice-based IF, there’s just something special about the freedom and immersion of the parser, of getting to be in literal conversation with the text. I am truly in the story, rather than a director pushing buttons to put on a good show.
Versificator games like Detectiveland present an interesting middle ground – parser sensibilities in multiple-choice skin. While I see the value in trying to make parser IF more accessible, I think there’s something to be said for doubling down on your submedium’s strengths and weaknesses, whether you’re writing parser, hypertext, or choice-based IF.
Parser may be (only mostly) dead, but its legacy lives on in video games. A museum near me has a World of Warcraft exhibit that pays homage to IF's influence on WoW:
I also still have a bunch of Infocom classics on my Apple IIc, as well as PC versions of a bunch more. My favorites are Hitchhiker’s Guide and Bureaucracy. Douglas Adams was a master!
I made my own parser-based games on my Apple IIc in the 1980s and early 1990s as well. One of them was so big there were only about 7-12 bytes of memory (out of 128K) free when it was loaded.
Oh, MY!!! An old C64 (and in such excellent condition)!
I also notice the old TSR AD&D 3rd Edition Dungeon Master’s Guide. I wish I knew if there was still some version of D&D still “Out There” equivalent to AD&D 3rd Ed.
I’m both pleased to see my precious Commodore & Infocom Games honored and remembered so… but distressed to see them in a museum, suggesting that they’re all dead and mouldering in a grave…
