Andy Baio has posted an interesting article based on a shared network drive that Infocom used in 1989.

Infocom, of course, is/was the company behind such text adventures — sorry, interactive fiction titles — as the Zork series, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and my personal favourite Planetfall. Baio’s article gives us a piece of history that is Milliways: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, the unreleased sequel to Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

It is a fairly long article, but well worth reading, as are the comments at the end of it. Doubly interesting is the question that it raises, somewhat unintentionally, about what constitutes (good) journalism and what one should do if one were to find a pot of gold like Baio has here stumbled upon.

I have no answers, as usual. Just observations.

Last night I was bored, not at all sleepy and had a total inertia against doing anything useful. So, I did what every normal person would do: I browsed the web. And lo and behold, I came across something very interesting.

The first thing I found (by explicitly searching for it) was an online version of Hamurabi, which was one of the first computer games ever made. It is an extremely simple text-based strategy game where you run a small nation by making decisions about land trade, feeding people and harvests. I think I have actually twice written an advanced Hamurabi clone myself, although I don’t have the source codes anymore. One was with Turbo Pascal, I think, and another with Visual Basic 5.0, if I remember correctly.

After having some fun with Hamurabi I started thinking that maybe they have some other big favourites of mine available Online. So, the next search was for Alter Ego, and there it was an online version of Alter Ego. Now, this 1986 game must be one of the most brilliant pieces of software ever. In it, you take the role of a person literally from birth onwards, and “live” as that person by making a series of decisions. If you have never experienced Alter Ego, you really ought to. I have spent countless of hours with it.

Finally, I started wondering how much interactive fiction there is available online. Turns out, rather much. The most interesting place I found has got to be this website where you can play Infocom’s adventure titles online. Infocom, of course, made the best Interactive Fiction titles. Planetfall and Stationfall are my favourites, although Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (written by Douglas Adams himself) is definitely worth a try. It is totally impossible to solve the game, of course, but it’s fun nevertheless. Too bad the website doesn’t have Adams’s other interactive fiction title available, the 1987 game Bureaucracy. Maybe I will search for it later on.