CP/M games... most of them are text adventures

Adventures from Infocom, early stars in game heaven !

Amazing how popular text adventures from Infocom were in the past.
Nowadays, nobody is exited about text adventures, most of the people would not even play such a game for 5 minutes.

But - even in stars like "World of Warcraft" today, puzzles inside these games costs time to solve. You just have to be patient a level higher. People playing such text adventures spent more than 30-40 hours for it (unless you got a solution).

The first Infocom text adventure was "Zork" (... THE great underground empire).
Two sequels followed, "Zork 2" and "Zork 3". All of them are based on a revolutionary idea: Logic was not hardwired, instead, a special intermediate code (= Zork interpreter language) was interpreted with an interpreter program (Z-Machine). So they didn't need to reinvent the whole program again and again, instead, the game was stored in a data file.

The games "Starcross", "Deadline", "Suspended", "Witness" and "Planetfall" followed.

One of the most popular game, "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" was published in 1984. Douglas Adams famous story about Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect, Tricia McMillan, the Vogons and last but not least Zaphod Beeblebrox is almost known from every IT nerd.

"Sorcerer", "Wishbringer" are also well made games, but less successful. A very weird story has "Leather Goddesses of Phobos", and later on Activision (which brought the company Infocom down)  never re-issued a game collection with this very special text adventure.

A screen from Leather Goddesses of Phobos:

"Bureaucracy" is a satire of the real, bureaucratic world - very interesting.
One of the last ones are "Border Zone" and "Beyond Zork".
"Arthur" was the last title which was published by Infocom, so the story ends with it here.

If you're further interested what files you need and what interpreter version per game is need, visit http://wiki.herzbube.ch/index.php/Z-Machine ...

If you're interested in porting a Z-Code interpreter back to CP/M, try this Turbo PASCAL source INF.ZIP first. You can find other (not that Turbo PASCAL one) at ifarchive.org ...

Please take also a look at the BASIC text adventure "kit" I have developed, which offers an easy way to programm your OWN text adventure, at the end of the >BASIC example page<.

CLICK ON A GAME NAME to download it - for CP/M computer only.

Any program/game here is only offered for educational purposes and for historical reason. It's barely done for fun, and pure non-commercial.