Edit: Some of those games are also playable online. The browser-based IF interpreter is called Parchment, and it's open-source too. https://code.google.com/p/parchment/
Back in 2000, I was working at a startup, and one of our rabbit trails was an IF interpreter for z-machine games on mobile phones. At that time, you could count on about 4 to 6 lines of text to be visible on a phone at any one time, and text input was horrendously tedious. Our founder approached Andrew Plotkin about licensing his games, and he was reportedly "kind of a dick" about it. Considering the source, that might have been projection.
I shudder to think of what might have happened if that company actually turned a profit from something, and this thing in particular.
Hey. This is me. I hope I was not that much of a dick, but at that point I wasn't interested in making money off old IF. I don't remember the specific incident, though.
(I'm still not very interested in making money off old IF, although I've tried a bit of that. The Hadean Lands plan is to charge money for a new game which has never been released before.)
Other notes: we also have a Boston IF meetup group (http://pr-if.org/).
The term "interactive fiction" dates from the early 80s, actually. Infocom used it in their ads with the general theme of "We're more serious and important than mere videogames." The term has been tussled back and forth over the years; these days it's more of an umbrella term than a niche.
IFComp organizer here. Pleased to see some interest in IF and the competition on HN!
I'll take this opportunity to say that the comp's judging period lasts through November 15, and is open to the public; anyone who rates at least five games via the website (at http://ifcomp.org) will have their votes counted.
This is the IFComp's 20th year, and we have 42 new text games for you to play. All of y'all are welcome to come join us!
By the way, it's highly noteworthy, for hackers/devs especially, that the newest Inform programming language (Inform 7, a.k.a. Natural Inform), for writing Interactive Fiction, is based on natural language -- i.e. "code that reads like English." Thus, the mandatory Hello World looks like below (copied from Wikipedia):
"Hello World" by "I.F. Author"
The world is a room.
When play begins, say "Hello, world."
What's even more surprising (at least to me), is that it actually seems to work, and quite nice! And the feeling of writing in it is really awesome and like nothing else. That said, it's not completely without quirks, obviously (what hit me most, personally, were problems with backwards compatibility between far away versions).
I've been playing around with this in recent months and while it does work, it's a pretty deep language with lots of quirks (kind of like English, actually...)
I recommend anyone who is interested in language design having a look at it, as it is a unique and interesting variation on domain-specific languages that sacrifices scalability and performance in favour of a certain kind of accessibility and power.
I've been using Aaron Reed's "Creating Interactive Fiction with Inform7" as a guide, which is as much about the nature of IF storytelling as the language (which is well-documented in the standard IDE): http://www.amazon.com/Creating-Interactive-Fiction-Inform-7/...
It's free, there's often pizza, and the group usually plays a few games together on the projector, or hear artists discuss their work in-person. Come down and play some games!
ooh, playing games together on a projector is a lovely idea for a meetup! i have fond memories of doing that in college, with friends crowded around a monitor and playing through some of the ifcomp games. interactive fiction lends itself nicely to that sort of group effort.
Around 2009 somebody came up with the idea of marrying Inform7 games with multiplayer, he called it Guncho. I am not entirely sure how this differs from regular MUD playing but I can imagine it's very nice if you want to explore the same atmospheric 'realm' together. A realm that's easily build with the excellent Inform7 natural language tools and world simulation. The only obstacle is finding players to play the game. The platform is C# and open source, I like the idea so much I'm installing it now on my own machine.
https://www.guncho.com/
I played a text-based MUD called Federation II for about a year before I moved over to a more popular title named Gemstone III, which was a sort of text-based precursor to World of Warcraft, where you could run around and kill rats and cast spells and such. I was obsessed with GS3 for a few years until my early teens. It was no less addictive than Warcraft later became (at massive scale), and back in the days when AOL was $3 per hour for dial-up, this was not an inexpensive activity. Fortunately my parents wanted to support my interests and for several years I received "AOL coupons" for all the usual holidays, my birthday, and chores around the house. I'm glad they found a way to make it work, because those experiences are what inspired me to learn how to code - I wanted to make a virtual world just like the ones I fell in love with playing. Most people I've talked to who never played them definitely underestimate how immerse a text environment can be.
I'll note that Gemstone IV (same game world, same general idea) still exists, and is one of only a handful of subscription MUDs that still exists. An account is $15 a month.
For those without an interactive fiction client you can read attack of the yetti robot zombies[1] via http. This text stuff is really versatile; no wonder it rose again.
You might also take a look at inkle's 80 Days (http://www.inklestudios.com/80days/) to see how I.F. has evolved on mobile devices. Warning: There are a few illustrations, but not too many.
It seems a lot of the IF games are based around old engines, or at least old engine concepts. Don't get me wrong, I loved the old games back in the day, the sense of exploring a large and unknown world was awesome.
I wonder what would be possible these days with a cutting-edge natural language processing, and a game engine designed to run dozens of bots. Each bot would have its own attitude, goals, behaviors, quirks, etc.
Aside from the occasional IF game, the height of NPC interaction these days seems to be just picking a sentence off of a menu. Maybe you can blame the rise of the consoles for that, but even so I think we could do better.
It's really a shame for mobile gaming that this does push hard in this direction. [0] is one of the few developers who make great interactive fiction for Android (and maybe iOS). Their "Sourcery" and "Sourcery 2" games are really really nice (although terribly short).
What I'm missing is also a "Professor Layton"-like game.
Text adventures were magical to me in the early 80s when I started playing them. My child mind had no idea how a computer program could do what it was doing. I was talking to a machine, and it was talking back to me and taking me on an adventure.
Then graphics came along and made them pretty much obsolete.
Then they got renamed to "Interactive Fiction", and, frankly, became a really weird niche.
Has anyone tried to marry IF with voice recognition (+synthesis or recorded content)?
I imagine it could be a wonderful experience, sitting with a headset, eyes closed, and exploring this kind of world. Not unlike "pen&paper" role playing games - even if you have to restrict your speaking to a limited vocabulary.
Edit: Some of those games are also playable online. The browser-based IF interpreter is called Parchment, and it's open-source too. https://code.google.com/p/parchment/