This page is my personal "short list" of favorite text adventures written for the z-machine platform. This is not a comprehensive list of all such games: there are literally hundreds, most of which are downloadable from the Interactive Fiction Archive. What's listed below are my own personal favorites — the ones I want to share with friends and users of the Twisty application. Most of the modern games tend to be contest-winners as well.
To play one of these games:
| Game | Comments |
|---|---|
| Zork | Infocom's first game: brought 'Adventure' off the mainframe and to the general masses of early-80's PC users. Not the best game ever, but a genre-definer to be sure! Incidentally, Activision has a page where you can download all three Zork adventures.. |
| Trinity | Beautifully sculpted game from Infocom; succinct writing and famous puzzles. To play this, you'll have to buy the Infocom Adventure Collection and get your own legal copy. Well worth the money, considering how many games you get! |
| A Mind Forever Voyaging | Infocom; really intense sci-fi; the plotline (and politics) really blew me away as a teen. Again, you'll need to buy this from Activision. |
| Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy | classic Douglas Adams, perfectly restructured as interactive plot and puzzles. Classic humor! Not sure if it's purchaseable at all, though; even Activision doesn't sell it, for copyright reasons. Try bittorrent? |
| Suspect | Infocom's classic murder-mystery novel with excellent NPCs: atmosphere is totally absorbing. Buy it in the Activision collection. |
| Curses | This is the game which started the text adventure renaisassance in the late 90's. Explore your attic while enjoying dry wit and puzzles. It was written by the guy who created the Inform language (for writing text adventures); it sets a high bar for the modern generation of authors writing free games distributed over the net. Highly recommended! |
| Bronze | Excellent introduction to Interactive Fiction, with a terrifically helpful "notice" mode for players new to the medium. A twist on Beauty and the Beast. |
| The Edifice | Metaphor as Game — enough said. Brilliantly done! |
| Spider and Web | A spy-suspense story. Excellent writing and difficult puzzles; known for surprise twists and revealing the player's identity slowly. |
| Ad Verbum | Funny puzzles based on puns and word-games, in the spirit of Infocom's Nord and Bert. Tastes great, less filling. |
| Slouching Towards Bedlam | Dark and disturbing adventure in a psychiatric hospital, and comes with an awesome robot. |
| Vespers | Even darker and more eerie: life in a middle-ages monastery struck by the Plague. |
| Lost Pig | Delightful narration from a demented Orc. Love it. |
| Trainstopping | My own wild-west game, a rough work in progress. You've been warned. :-) |
| Platform | Interpreter | Comments |
|---|---|---|
| Windows | Windows Frotz | The Gold Standard interpreter for Microsoft Windows. |
| Mac | Zoom | Don't think about it; just download it now. It's beautiful and simple. |
| Linux | Frotz | Amazingly, there's no pretty GUI-ified interpreter for Linux yet; just build this source code yourself, or attempt to install 'frotz' via your distribution's binary package system. |
| Emacs | Malyon | If you're an emacs-head, just put malyon.el in your lisp-path and (load "malyon.el") into your .emacs. You can then start the interpreter by running 'M-x malyon'. |
| Palm OS | CliFrotz | Should run on modern PolmOS 4/5 devices. |
| Android Phone | Twisty | This is my own pet project for Android! |
| iPhone | iPhone Frotz | For now, requires a "jailbroken" iPhone. After June 2008, this might turn into a legitimate application which is downloadable via iTunes. |
| Nokia Maemo OS | GFrotz | Should run on the Nokia 770, 800, or 810; grab the appropriate version. |