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Normally considered single-player experiences, the text adventure genre has just taken a large step in a collaboratively multiplayer direction. Several members of the Idle Thumbs forum community have designed a special forum-bot that plays text adventures with other members. His name is Ziggy.

At the moment, Ziggy is programmed to play Zork, a classic text adventure made by Infocom in the late 70s. In a thread started by Ziggy, players post replies with commands like "go north" or "take letter." Ziggy then replies, performs the commands, and continues the game.

The Ziggy threads allow for commenting as well, giving players the chance to discuss moves before executing them. This makes the whole a great deal more collaborative, although so far it hasn't been helping. The first play-through of Zork resulted in death at the hands of a hungry cyclops, and the second at the hands of a hungry grue. It's clear that after two losses in a row, the adventurers could use a little extra help in their third attempt. Anyone know the way to the Great Underground Empire?

[Via GameSetWatch]

Everyone should know that we're big fans of Zork here at Joystiq HQ (it's one of the 10 most important games, remember?). So it's doubly exciting to see this map pop up all over the place today. At first blush, it may appear to be a charming, hand-drawn map of Infocom's seminal text-adventure game, but upon closer inspection it doesn't match up. Why? Because it's a map of the mainframe version of Dungeon, the antecedent to Zork, "equivalent to Zork I + about half of Zork II + the endgame of Zork III." Better still, there's DOS, Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux versions to go along with the map, so there's no excuse not to play it!

[Via Cathode Tan]

We can't tell you to download them (in fact, we'll tell you not to), but we can definitely applaud the technical achievement. A homebrew genius called papafuji has ported a massive selection of classic text adventures and early graphic adventure games to the DS, including all of Infocom's text adventures and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams' interactive fiction.

These aren't just barebones ports, either: you can save games, and you can choose to enter text via an onscreen keyboard or handwriting input! And the game engine contains shorthand functionality for common commands like cardinal directions and "get".

Some of the games are public domain, but most aren't, and we aren't sure which games fall in which category. Therefore, we're officially warning you: if you download these games, there's a good chance that you are a pirate.

[Thanks, Joq!]

RetroBlast's Motivational Poster Contest has come to a close, and the winning Zork entry is pretty spectacular. Simple, but spectacular, we'd love to order one if we could. Infocom's games always took place inside your head, because they were just text on a screen, but they were some of the best games ever written.

Check out the winners and all the other entries. Have a favorite that didn't make it to the top? Still want to design your own? Let us know about it.

"You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here."

If you've never experienced the bliss of staring at the above -- the opening line of text adventure classic Zork -- you're missing out on one of the formative titles in video game history. This week, The Escapist takes a cursory look at Infocom, the company behind Zork, and what became of them. In short, they blew it on a piece of business software called Cornerstone (yuck).

While The Escapist piece (ironically titled "The Short, Happy Life of Infocom") is far too short to encapsulate the company's meteoric success or their similarly swift demise at the hands of Activision, lucky for us, there is an exhaustively researched study done by some MIT students (natch) in 2000 that is still taking up residency on the web. Down From the Top of Its Game: The Story of Infocom, Inc. is available in an easy to read, 50-page PDF here so, if The Escapist piece whets your appetite for text adventure, you can have seconds.

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Interactive phiction: Zork phone demo is online

Remember ZoiP (née Zasterisk), the open source implementation of the text-adventure classic that you play on the phone? Installation required rolling up your sleeves and installing some *NIX-y stuff which, despite my urgent desire to experience this, I never got around to doing. Fine, the real reason I never got around to doing it was because the project's author, simon, promised to have a call-in number available to test the project out. Why do today what someone else will do for you later, y'know what I'm saying?

It's later and, true to his word, simon's put the public beta of ZoiP online. All it took was a little linkage from Boing Boing, Make: Blog, digg, and ... ahem ... Joystiq to get the old motivation meter up. Here's how you do it:

• Call 416-548-7557 (Toronto, ON, Canada) which is the "best quality." Otherwise try 360-226-7386 (WA, USA) which is "a little choppy."
• Or use a SIP-compliant program like Gizmo and add zoip@demo.zoip.org and dial out. This method worked the best for me (and it's free).
  

I'm not sure if it's just me, but some calls seem to go much better than others in regards to voice recognition. On some, I can roll right through, other times I'm stuck repeating myself more often than "blue" in Brain Age. He warns to speak naturally, as "careful enunciation actually seems to make things worse." Give it a shot and let us know how far you get.

Forget Michael Bolton, Zork is the best hold music ever! From Zasterisk:

"I was tinkering with Asterisk and the Festival text-to-speech engine, and wrote some short Asterisk::AGI scripts to read back live weather reports. After that, I thought I needed something more interactive to work with...

"Now Zork is back! Listen as the eerie voice of Festival takes you into the Underground Empire, and marvel as you explore this world with your dial pad, unlocking the secrets within!"

You'll need to install the Asterisk open source phone-switcher (*NIX only, that includes you Mac users), the Festival text-to-speech application, and then let Zasterisk work its special brand of magic, turning that boring phone tree into a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.

Too much work, you say? Good news! On March 13th the project's creator, simon, announced "over the next few weeks I'll be putting a public beta online for you to call in to." A few weeks is, like, right now! We're officially on the lookout.

[Via Boing Boing]