The Retro Adventurers

>TAKE PITY AND EXAMINE IT.
Nobody's angry with Chris for self-destructive adventure game choices, just worried about him. 1984's hottest adventure titles, up-to-date coding environments for out-of-date platforms, a full 3D FPS in just 64k, and more when This Week in Retro 258 arrives this Saturday!

Zarf is being a good sport about his Patreon targets so we'll spell it out: if you care about old text adventures AT ALL, GIVE HIM YOUR MONEY
patreon.com/VisibleZorker

Four classic Atari ST adventures - Jinxter, Silicon Dreams, Wonderland, and Beyond Zork.

I got a couple of very lovely Atari ST adventure games in the post this morning. I always wanted to own a copy of Wonderland. *drools*

Infocom books still findable in the wild!

More on Zork bugs. (I may be blogging a lot of these…)

blog.zarfhome.com/2026/02/when...

🔊 This episode features a really informative chat re. more modern IF creations/history & details on IF competitions I was unfamiliar with.

There’s a bit of an experience difference in the chat, perhaps divided on pre/post-Plotkin 🤓

🎮 #VideoGames ⌨️ #TextAdventures #InteractiveFiction 🗺️ #Podcasts 📻

Information Sought: Unknown Amstrad CPC Text Adventures Several Amstrad CPC titles have been flagged up that appear to be completely undocumented. The games were discovered among a batch of CPC tapes and feature homemade labels and inlays. The titles are: ...

Amstrad CPC community: Unknown text adventures have surfaced and more information about them is needed. Were they commercially released? Who was the author Steve Ralph? Any info appreciated:
www.gamesthatwerent.com/2026/02/info...

Ron Martinez (Star Trek: The Promethean Prophecy, Hidden Agenda, Trek: TNG - The Transinium Challenge, Make Your Own Murder Party, etc.) returns for everything from Vladimir Nabokov to generative AI with Jason, Nick, and Dave V from @thisweekinretro.bsky.social .
retroadventurers.podbean.com/e/37

INFOCOM Disk in Suspect Package G-844-33

in fairness, I did find my 3.5" copy of TEST DRIVE III: THE PASSION in a ticking duffle bag at the bus tetminal

Here we go...

Announcing the Visible Zorker Project and Patreon! Remember how I did Visible Zork 1 and 2? I'm going to do Zork 3, and then continue through Infocom's entire canon -- in chronological order, one per month.

blog.zarfhome.com/2026/01/the-...

a photo of a yellow throw pillow sitting on a purple towel over a radiator in front of a window with a blue towel on its sill and venetian blinds behind the cushion. the pillow has the 1970s french curve Zork logo with Dave Lebling's initials

Gotta get my #zork on, now!

The Colonel’s House: Interview with the Author (Continued from a post from a year ago. You should probably read that post before this one.) While I occasionally reach a videogame in the All the Adventures project which is famous enough to have …

I played The Colonel's House, a VIC-20 adventure game, about a year ago. The author contacted me not long ago and I did an interview, so I am able to give the history of how the game was made for the first time.

bluerenga.blog/2026/01/20/t...

original post here: bluerenga.blog/2025/03/10/t...

[Antiquated computer graphics depict a moonlit graveyard.] Command: READ GRAVE It says ‘Here Lies BRET’… and it has today’s date.

I was already feeling hella old while playing this 40 year old PC game, so I 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 didn’t need 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀.

Check the thread, someone out there should be able to figure this out. (Perhaps a Softside Adventure or similar?)

post a game you remember playing that nobody else remembers

Demoniak - a 1991 interactive fiction game, written by Alan Grant (Judge Dredd etc)

Notably, I do not believe anyone ever completed this game. There are no complete walkthroughs online, while there are for _every_ other IF game of the era

White paper with a map drawn in pencil and outlined in ink. Title of the game in a scary font is upper right. Island name is centered above. Pen, pencil, and mechanical eraser lie in wait.

If you like maps you’ll love this hand drawn view of Hardscrabble Island from the #Infocom game Cutthroats.
#RetroGames

Huge for the Holidays: Epic Interactive Fiction of the Millennial Period, de The Digital Antiquarian.

www.filfre.net/2025/12/huge...

Not my house, but I know my way around

its/src/imsrc/ssv22.2 at master · PDP-10/its Incompatible Timesharing System. Contribute to PDP-10/its development by creating an account on GitHub.

https://github.com/PDP-10/its/blob/master/src/imsrc/ssv22.2 ← Thanks to @larsbrinkhoff for pointing out some material containing some good 70s MIT nonsense variable names:

`ZROCK` `SMULCH` `WHAMZ` `TWONG` `TWONK` `TWITCH` `UHNUH`

We play the oldest and the newest-surviving variants of the original text adventure known simply as Zork. The 1977 edition Zork-285 and the 1990 (!) release of Mini-Zork are the featured games in Episode 36 of The Retro Adventurers.
retroadventurers.podbean.com/e/36/

#ScottAdams, the founder of #AdventureInternational, is alive and well and living in Wisconsin. #InteractiveFiction

Haunted House (Lucas, 1983) Writing an adventure game is very similar to writing a novel. Everybody can write a few unrelated sentences, but the novelist’s skill comes from stringing sentences together in such a way as to cre…

in which I tell the story of how a company called Silverlind got formed due to the shenanigans of the mighty International Computers Limited (a combination of 9 distinct companies) and one of the three adventure games that they published

bluerenga.blog/2026/01/12/h...

>TURN KEY. PUSH CLUTCH WITH FOOT.

Adventure 751: Ersatz Materials (Continued from my previous posts.) Noble warriors of a distant age! Participate in the first-ever Nationwide Adventure Tournament on the CompuServe Information Service. Beginning at 6 p.m. local t…

Adventure 751 (the game from CompuServe only recently rescued) continues, as I near the threshold of finishing all 501 content, with only the cursed leprechaun standing in the way of major progress.

bluerenga.blog/2026/01/07/a...

- early successful licensed property blending literal book events with text adventure format
- successful collab of programmer and author
- remarkable sideways take on traditional inventory mechanic (tea/no tea)
- pokes at notions of player "fairness" in several ways

Seems very influential.

Check out my funtime project from the holiday break!

blog.zarfhome.com/2026/01/the-...

Will I continue on to Zork 3? Watch this space!

(Those materials are freely available in 8,000 Internet locations. Conservative estimate.)

NarraScope call for proposals is open! We're at the University at Albany, June 12-14.

Now accepting:

- Talks
- The Showcase (games)
- The Experience (new this year!)

blog.zarfhome.com/2026/01/narr...

narrascope.org

GAME STUDIES STUDY BUDDIES closes out the month, and the year, with a discussion of another documentary--this time following the twisty passages of history and medium with 2010's text adventure doc GET LAMP. rangedtouch.com/2025/12/31/8...

All the Adventures, All of 2025 Congrats, you survived 2025! (Mostly. As of this writing, still a little time left.) I’ve already done a review roughly mid-year because I “finished” 1982; you can read about that…

My All the Adventures recap for 2025, which included far more surprises than I imagined possible, on top of some recovered "lost games":

bluerenga.blog/2025/12/31/a...