With the EXCEPTION of Zork, Infocom’s games were primarily highly plot
detailed and many of the puzzles were next to impossible to solve.
SPELLBREAKER??
Actually, I thought Spellbreaker’s plot was pretty weak (though it certainly had more plot than Zork); I’m not a big fan of the jump-around-between-disconnected-areas type of game. (If you were just naming Spellbreaker as an example of a game with horrendously difficult puzzles, though, I’ll agree, and they weren’t all difficult for the right reasons…) And while some of Infocom’s other games did have better plots, I wouldn’t say in general that all of Infocom’s games aside from Zork were ‘highly plot detailed’. Still, though, yes, most of Infocom’s games did have much more plot than Zork; I’m not denying that. I was only responding to a post saying that Zork, specifically, had plot as a high priority. Infocom’s later games, yes. Zork, no.
I guess I was thinking about the type of people that would play them
today. I love them, but I really can’t see people today playing them.
I’m not so sure text adventures couldn’t be successfully sold today, if they were marketed right. But it would take some creative marketing to get the public interested in them, and I doubt any major company is going to be willing to take the risk to revive the genre when there are so many other genres they can develop that people are already drawn into. So I guess we’ll never know.
Definitely I agree that King’s Quest was more influental….Graphical Adventures were more prevaliant, and lasted longer…
Again, though, King’s Quest probably would never have existed if text adventures hadn’t come first, so does it really make sense to say that the text adventures were less influential? (I’m not referring here to Zork specifically, though; again, Zork wasn’t the first text adventure.) Like I said, I don’t think there’s much point in asking whether the first text adventure or the first graphic adventure was more influential; they represent very different stages in the industry, and influenced it in different ways. Which was more influential isn’t really (in my opinion) a meaningful question.