Adventure Game Hotspot Network Presents: The Lost Treasures of Infocom Retrospective with Adventure Game Geek

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Features by Adventure Game Hotspot staff
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Remember the time when adventure games didn’t have graphics? The days when we had to read and type using a text parser to play? Back then companies like Melbourne House, Magnetic Scrolls and of course Infocom ruled the adventure genre. It’s hard to even imagine anymore, now that we have games like Firmament and Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened in all of their visual glory at our fingertips. But back then text was king, and one of the era's most priceless relics is The Lost Treasures of Infocom.

This 1991 collection contains 20 classic text adventures created by Infocom in the 1980s and early 1990s, which are still considered by fans of interactive fiction to be some of the best examples of the genre ever written. The Lost Treasures of Infocom includes some of the company's most popular games like The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, based on the book by Douglas Adams; Zork, one of Infocom's earliest games; and Planetfall, a sci-fi adventure that was as well-received by critics as it was beloved by fans.

Infocom was eventually sold to Activision, which (stop me if you’ve heard this before) discontinued the brand and stopped producing text adventures or doing anything more with those original IPs. Fortunately, The Lost Treasures of Infocom prevents these venerable classics from ever being truly lost, and to this day remains perhaps the finest compilaton of text adventures ever assembled.

In this fun, nostalgia-fueled deep-dive video, Adventure Game Hotspot Network partner Adventure Game Geek puts on his explorer hat (literally) and unearths some of the ancient gems from The Lost Treasures of Infocom.