You are absolutely correct, especially in the case of Zork and other similar types of software. There will never be games like that again, precisely for the reasons that you've described. Interactive fiction never went away, people have never stopped making it - and we've been seeing a full-on revival of the visual adventure game for quite some time now. It's not the same stuff though, and it can't be - both because of the people developing it and the changing expectations of us as consumers.Pisscubes wrote:It's very funny for me when I start feeling like telling tales of playing Zork on a TRS-80, Adventure on the 2600 or Megaman on the NES the first time 'round like I'm talking about "...walking to school in three feet of snow, up hill both ways", because I never mean it to sound that way. I LOVED the games of my youth. But it was a lot more of an isolated thing. I feel like since now you can download whatever the fuck you want if you have the money (or pirate ALMOST anything the fuck you want if you don't), it may not be as easy for people to spend so much time mastering one game. So the games have to be flashier, of course, but also have to be a bit easier in someway. They're afraid that if someone gets stuck, they'll just move on to another game. Set that side by side with my mom letting me bike to the local video store where I would have enough money to rent one (1) game for the weekend and that was that. So you'd play outside during the day if it was nice but other than that-- that game was your weekend. You sort of HAD to spend time going over it like Rainman, over and over until you got it because what the fuck else where you going to play?
Those original Infocom titles and the early point-and-clicks were special because they existed in a unique time and place. They're certainly not 'better' games - it was just circumstance and limitation giving way to an inimitable character. The people making those games were of a different generation, and were plowing into absolutely unexplored territory as far as technology, craftsmanship and industry are concerned. That is invariably going to birth something completely different than a contemporary designer developing for an established market with preconceptions and expectations on both sides.
The language and flavor of the Infocom games are very very heavily influenced by academic and nerd culture of the late 1970s - Tolkien had not yet been thoroughly exploited, and the notion of exploring a dungeon was exciting and not something which required a new spin or elaboration in order to seem novel. There is a dreamlike quality to them which I have never discovered anywhere else, which I think also comes from a slightly more innocent approach to fantasy. Modern and romantic objects appear right next to each other without any need to explain themselves, with this weird infuriating nerd humor anti-logic - it all has much more in common with Lewis Carroll or Neil Gaiman's more whimsical stuff than the stern, 'mature' Game of Thrones feeling you see in games like Skyrim trying to capture today.
I've never been able to re-experience the feeling of playing through those games. I've tried, but it just never comes to me - even in moving through Infocom games I never played in the first place. The online multi-user dungeons were dying when I discovered them in the late 90s, and the ones I loved the most are now all completely gone, wiped away without a trace. It's a weird and overwhelming feeling, feeling sad and nostalgic over the loss of worlds which never actually existed in the first place.
All of my best music comes from that place, it's what I try to summon up when I make anything that isn't just for fun - and obviously why I named the project Telnet.
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I actually wanted to cross it out and write "Demon's" next to it, but we don't have the BBCode for that, apparently.
