Besides Infocom & Scott Adams what other Text/Graphic Adventures were gold?

[tamago]

I think we all know about Infocom and Scott Adams (and for that matter, Sierra Online). Were their any unknown company that cranked out great adventuers in the "GO NORTH" "INVENTORY" style?

[thomasholzer]

Many unknowns out there, her's some more known ones:

 

UKs Level 9 did some excellent text adventures, check out Wikipedia

Broderbund/Synapse did some very good text adventures: Essex, Mindwheel, Breakers and some more

Activision had some good text adventures

Penguin (Rama, Nine princess...etc)

Edited March 14, 2007 by thomasholzer

[JamesD]

There were actually a lot of companies that had great adventure games.

Some were just specific to individual machines though.

 

The Magnetic Scrolls made several really good adventures... not sure how many machines they supported though.

http://www.if-legends.org/~msmemorial/lega...es.htm/pawn.htm

[potatohead]

One, I think was significant, was "Madness and the Minoutar" for the CoCo. Unlike most text adventures, it was a real time game. Things happened while you were reading!

[JamesD]

Level 9

http://www.waddington.fslife.co.uk/level9.htm

[JamesD]

One, I think was significant, was "Madness and the Minoutar" for the CoCo. Unlike most text adventures, it was a real time game. Things happened while you were reading!

I think the Coco was the first machine to have an animated adventure.

I'm not sure but I *think* it was Pyramid Adventure.<edit> Sands of Egypt

After that there were a bunch.

Edited March 14, 2007 by JamesD

[JamesD]

Some of the many Coco adventures:

Adventures in Mythology

Adventure in Wonderland

Bedlam

Blackbeard's Island

Caladuril: Flame of Light

Dallas Quest

Dr. Livingston

Escape 2012

The Interbank Incident

Hall of the King

Hall of the King II: The Inner Chambers

Hall of the King III: The Earthstone Revealed

Major Istar - Under the Doomed Sea

Martian Crypt

Plateau of the Past

Sands of Egypt

Tower of Fear

 

 

There were some games that were part adventure and part arcade:

Beyond the Cimeeon Moon

Fembots Revenge

Edited March 14, 2007 by JamesD

[Student Driver]

Activision had some good text adventures

 

I actually came in here to mention these, specifically the ones developed by Interplay. Activision was selling these for cheap seemingly a month or two after their original releases-- apparently they didn't sell well: Tass Times in Tonetown, Borrowed Time, etc.

 

I kinda liked some of the Sierra On-Line "Hi-Res Adventures" that predate the King's Quest series. This was one place where the Apple II really outshone the C64, as they only ported the earlier/crappier games (Mission: Asteroid, say) to the Commodore...

 

I never really dug the Scott Adams/Adventure International games; the early titles were designed for the lowest-common-denominator computers (how many other text adventures got VIC-20 releases?), designed to be loaded fully into memory (and that memory was often 16k or less), so they were typically set in tiny worlds, had tiny vocabularies and rudimentary parsers, and had only a few puzzles. The later releases, like the Questprobe games, increased the world size and puzzles, and finally broke the single-load mentality, but the parser still sucked.

 

Scott Adams games, as well as a lot of other text adventures of the time, often had puzzles that could not be solved through logic and common sense (or by clever in-game hints), but by pure guesswork. That sucked. I find the same still occurs in modern point-and-click adventures; you shouldn't have to randomly stab at a puzzle's solution-- it should make sense in the adventure's world.

[Wrathchild]

Don't forget Brian Howarth's good Mysterious Adventures series

and Jymm Pearson's great games like The Curse of Crowley Manor,

Escape from Traam and Earthquake 1906

[AussieAtari]

Who brought out Hitchiker's Guide To The Galaxy? That is one of my favourite text adventures of all time.

[thomasholzer]

infocom