If you want to find information on the early history of adventures, try these links:

Adventureland (Hans Persson/Stefan Meier)

The big list of classic adventure companies and their games. There isn't much you won't find there... (Mirror available here.)

The History of Interactive Fiction (Graham Nelson)

This page has the whole 4th edition of Graham's "Inform Designer's Manual" (published 2001 in paperback) for download. Chapter VIII deals extensively with the history of adventures.

Giant List of Classic Game Programmers (James Hague)

A list of programmers from the classic age of computer games, many adventure authors among them.

The Colossal Cave Adventure Page (Rick Adams)

Many interesting tidbits about the game that started it all.

Some interesting places to visit:

The Adventure Market

This is a place where you can (try to) find and buy those games missing from your collection or sell the items you don't need. Maintained by Manuel Schulz.

Ye Olde Infocomme Shoppe (C.E. Forman)

Chris is a collector selling off (and trading) his spare Infocoms and other adventures. His selection is good, the prices are fair, and he also writes a regular collector's column. Well worth a visit.

The Preserving Classic Adventures Project (PreCAP)

As indicated by the (slightly pretentious) name of the project, the idea is to collect and preserve classic adventures before the old original tapes and disks fall prey to bit rot. The danger of losing an entire heritage of adventure games is very real, as many collectors value their "pristine shrinkwraps" more highly than the actual games. If you're not that kind of collector, please join in!

Scott Adams' Adventureland was the first text adventure playable on the small home computer "micros" of the late 1970s (with no disk drive and only 16 or 24 KB memory). He wrote it in 1978 and founded his company Adventure International (AI) to publish it. AI published 17 other adventures (many of them best sellers) between 1979 and 1985.



Scott Adams

The homepage of the man himself.

(The author of the popular Dilbert comic, by the way, is a completely different Scott Adams.)

You might also be interested in what Scott had to say on the topic of interactive storytelling during a panel discussion at the University of Wisconsin in 2001.

AI Memorial (David Lodge)

General information, datafiles, cover scans... it's all there (or will be in time).

Scott Adams adventures

Datafiles for: Adventureland, Pirate's Cove, Mission Impossible, Voodoo Castle, The Count, Strange Odyssey, Mystery Fun House, Pyramid of Doom, Ghost Town, Savage Island I and II, Golden Voyage, Sorcerer of Claymorgue Castle, Return to Pirate's Isle, Buckaroo Banzai, The Hulk, Spiderman, the AI Sampler.

AI Adventure Hints

A hint reader (source and MS-DOS executable) written by David Lodge, complete with hints for all the Scott Adams adventures (transcribed from the official AI hint booklet). If you're stuck in a game you can get small, gentle hints as well as a complete solution to your problem.

ScottDec 7

Decoder (ANSI-C source and MS-DOS executable) for Scott Adams datafiles. Useful if you want to know how the system worked, but it can also be used as a cheating tool.

SAGA+ datafiles

The SAGAplus system was a late incarnation of Scott's parser, allowing more complex input sentences. You can download datafiles for: Buckaroo Banzai, Sorcerer of Claymorgue Castle, Spiderman, Fantastic Four.

But beware: you can't play these games, because ScottFree has no SAGA+ support yet. Sorry.

Authoring systems for writing adventures in the AI datafile format were available on several platforms (TRS-80, TI 99/4A), and dozens of adventures were written with them. Brian Howarth was the most prolific author of games in the AI format. His series of 11 Mysterious Adventures, published between 1981 and 1983, is now freely distributable and can be played with the ScottFree interpreter.



Scott Adams/Mysterious Adventures GFX formats

Description, comparison, extraction tools for the graphics in the AI UK games. Still work in progress (and part of my attempt to redesign this whole site...)

Mysterious Adventures

Datafiles for: The Golden Baton, The Time Machine, Arrow of Death I and II, Escape from Pulsar 7, Circus, Feasibility Experiment, Wizard of Akyrz, Perseus and Andromeda, Ten Little Indians, Waxworks. (Also included are four bonus games: Supergran, Gremlins, Robin of Sherwood, Seas of Blood.)

Mysterious Adventures (Commodore 64)

C64 versions of all 11 Mysterious Adventures, with graphics. You'll need a C64 (or C64 emulator) to play them.

Infocom was founded in 1979 and closed down in 1989. In their 10 years of existence they published 35 text adventures, among them undisputed classics like the Zork trilogy, Suspended, Planetfall, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and Trinity. All their games are worth playing.



London-based Magnetic Scrolls can justly be called the British Infocom. Founded by Ken Gordon and Anita Sinclair, they combined a state-of-the-art parser, beautiful graphics (especially in the 16-bit versions) and excellent writing with a great sense of humour in their adventure games. The graphics added a lot to the atmosphere (although text adventure purists can switch them off if they like...).

Magnetic Scrolls published 7 adventures between 1985 and 1992: The Pawn, The Guild of Thieves, Jinxter, Corruption, Fish!, Myth, and Wonderland.



Level 9 Software was founded by Pete Austin and his brothers Mike and Nick in 1982. They soon became the most successful European adventure company. While the Infocom games never really caught on in the UK due to the fact that they required a disk drive, Level 9 managed to squeeze hundreds of rooms and objects into the small 32K or 48K memory space of the popular 8-bit home "micros" (BBC, Sinclair Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, MSX, C64). Their first game was an adaptation of Colossal Cave called Colossal Adventure. Among their other adventures are classics like Lords of Time, Snowball, Return to Eden, Red Moon, Gnome Ranger, Knight Orc, and Scapeghost.



Do game titles like Acheton, Hezarin, Hamil or Fyleet ring a bell? If the answer is yes, then you're one of the few people who have ever played these text adventures. Which is amazing not only because they are classics of the genre (Acheton was originally written on Phoenix, a Cambridge University mainframe, in the late 1970s - at the same time as the original Zork!), but also seeing that many of them have been commercially available during the 1990s via Topologika.



Topologika WWW page

The homepage only mentions the text adventures in passing, but the company is still there, producing all sorts of educational software.

Phoenix/Topologika in the IF Archive

All the games have been made freely available in 1999. You can download the Topologika ports (IBM PC versions) from here, as well as selected original Phoenix sources and Inform ports. More sources and ports will be made available in due time...

Penguin/Polarware (based in Geneva, IL) published 8 text-with-graphics adventures in the 1980s: The Quest, RingQuest, Transylvania, Oo-Topos, Crimson Crown (Transylvania II), The Coveted Mirror, Talisman, and Transylvania III.



The Polarware Page

Mark Pelczarski (founder and ex-owner of Penguin) maintains this official page with lots of background info about the history of the company. Apple II and IBM PC versions of several games can be downloaded from there; plus you can read the strange story of why Mark himself is no longer allowed to mention "Penguin Software" on his pages...

Penguin games in the IF Archive (MS-DOS)

Three of their games can already be downloaded from the IF Archive: Transylvania, Crimson Crown and Talisman. (If you happen to have the MS-DOS version of any of the others, please send it to me or simply upload it to the IF Archive.)

Angelsoft, Inc., based in White Plains, NY, was founded by John R. Sansevere and Mercer Mayer. The company created eight text adventures in 1985/86, most of them book or film adaptations. Among the titles: Forgotten Castle (a.k.a. Sleeping Beauty), Voodoo Island, Stephen King's The Mist, and Rambo - First Blood part II (!!).



What? No links?

Well, the sad truth is that I didn't find any useful links. Their games were written in a rather simple script language called ASG, but no portable interpreter has been written so far. Anybody looking for a programming project?

Melbourne House was an Australian software publisher. Several of their adventures (Sherlock, the Tolkien games: The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Shadows of Mordor, Crack of Doom) were written by Beam Software who now own the rights and allow their free distribution.



Early Beam adventures (Spectrum)

The two earliest Beam adventures, The Hobbit (the first, rather buggy release) and Sherlock. (These are TAP files of the Sinclair Spectrum versions, so you'll need to find a Speccy emulator that handles TAP files.)

The Tolkien Trilogy (Spectrum)

This was a budget re-release of Beam's first 3 Tolkien adventures: Hobbit (bug-fixed version), Lord of the Rings a.k.a. Fellowship of the Ring, Shadows of Mordor. (Available as TAP files.)

Sierra? Yep, Sierra! Before Coarsegold-based Sierra On-Line became the corporate monster many adventure fans love to hate, they actually published some decent adventure games. Their series of "Hi-Res Adventures" (1980-83) includes classics like Mystery House, Ulysses and the Golden Fleece, and Time Zone. In their AGI0-2 period (1984-87) they perfected their combination of animated graphics and text input, with games like King's Quest I-III, Leisure Suit Larry I, and Space Quest I and II. After that, they abandoned their parser in favour of pointless clickery (thereby moving out of the scope of this web page).



Sarien AGI Interpreter (part of ScummVM) (Stuart George/Claudio Matsuoka)

Sarien (formerly called Yggdrasil) was the first open-sourced (and GPL'ed) AGI interpreter and has now been integrated into ScummVM. Current versions work with most AGI games.

NAGI AGI Interpreter (Nick Sonneveld)

Another AGI interpreter, almost completely functional. Full source code has been released under the X11 license. Nick also maintains an interesting AGI Development Site.

Vintage Sierra (Josh Lulewicz)

A very interesting collector's site, mainly dealing with the different packaging variants of Sierra's games.

The Ultimate AGI & SCI Site (Brian Provinciano)

There are countless AGI sites out there, and most of them are only very rarely updated. This one is no exception, but you can find AGI utilities and lots of home-brew games written in AGI here. Also available: tools for SCI (Sierra's later, no-parser interpreter).

AGInfo 1.40 (MS-DOS, with C source)

A utility that detects the AGI interpreter version, as well as the game version. Also detects a large number of corrupted game versions. Probably most useful for game collectors to find out whether they have a rare (i.e. undetected) game in their hands.

Legend Entertainment Co. were one of the last companies publishing text adventures. Founded by Bob Bates and Mike Verdu in 1989, they released seven text games (with graphics) between 1990 and 1993 - among them excellent games like Bob Bates' Timequest and Eric the Unready as well as the Spellcasting trilogy written by former Infocommie Steve Meretzky.

