>ASK COKE-BOTTLE GLASSES ABOUT GAME
He can't contain himself and gleefully begins, "Gee, this is a great game. We've almost finished it, just doing the last puzzle. You know this is the last text adventure Infocom's ever going to write now they've been taken over by Activision. They're still going to write some graphics adventures but they're not the same are they? It's like comparing a book to a film, different medium, right?"
Acne murmurs agreement.
>WAIT
...You wait for a exceptionally long time and over ten year pass, strangely you feel neither the need for sustenance or rest and don't get even the slightest bit bored...
>LOOK
The wiz kids are still here and playing a game that looks remarkably similar to the last one. They also look much the same still wearing jeans and trainers, still got bad haircuts. The only difference seems to be that they have acquired some stubble. The battered old terminal however has been replaced by a state of the art Pentium PC with scanner, bubble jet colour printer, colour monitor with text that adjusts to fit the screen, 56k modem, a 3.5" floppy drive which is hardy every used and a 5 gigabyte hard drive. The game box and 'goodies' seem to have disappeared. But a manual remains in the form of a amazingly long printout. Scrawled across the front page in biro are the letters D.M. You wonder whether that stands Dungeon Masters, one of their initials or Designers Manual, but don't like to ask as this would show your chronic ignorance. There are also a few chairs here.
>ASK COKE-BOTTLE GLASSES ABOUT GAME
He can't contain himself and gleefully begins, "Gee, this is a great game. We've almost finished it, just doing the last puzzle. You know there have hardy been any text adventures in years. When Infocom folded the golden age ended, they didn't even release their Z-Machine language which the games were written in, gits! That's Z for Zork in case you don't know.
Acne laughs apparently thinking anyone who couldn't work that out must be REALLY dumb and says "It was also called ZIL for Zork Implementation Language."
So WE had to make our own language, we reverse engineering the Z-Machine and came up with a bunch of protocols and things. Then this professor dude in Oxford, England wrote this language called Inform which is almost the same as the Z-Machine, just has different standard responses and can't do quite everything the old language could, but we're working on that. We're writing new games all the time, and have an annual competition with prizes. Gee whiz! But these games still don't have the old Infocom feel, so me and my buddy thought it would be a great idea to turn some of those great old Infocom Sample Transcripts into games. We've only got three, well two and a half, one's only half finished because we couldn't figure out how the fight mechanics worked, but we might write some more. Some other dude wrote this programme called Disinform that takes the original Infocom games files and de-compiles them so you can see all the original text, that makes writing the transcripts a lot easier. The transcripts are free so why don't you try one, ain't much in this live you get for nothing, right? But there are dozens of 'em so we can't write them ALL ourselves, we need some help. They can be exact copies or justly loosely based, it doesn't matter whatever best suits you; and you can go on to expand them beyond the original transcript if you want. It would be a good idea to let us know before hand so we don't get two people working on the same transcript. Just send us a copy and we'll add it to the archive. If you don't know Inform it's not too difficult to learn, just a bit like Object-Orientated C.
Acne shyly murmurs, "C'mon give us a hand. Keep the faith!"
>SIT ON CHAIR
You draw up a chair and say, "Yeah, I can help. Lets have a look at those transcripts and find an interesting one. But first I just wanna try the ones you've already written."