Comment by DrScientist
1 month ago
Indeed.
"Thorin sits down and starts singing about gold" or "You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike"
became early memes as a result.
However those memes also come from player frustration of being stuck in repeated patterns. The same can also happen with chat interfaces to LLMs.
However I'm not sure whether that's a function of the chat interface or the nature of LLMs.
If you think the Infocom games were like Zork I-III you don't understand how the ZMachine itself was improved over the years upon creating masterpieces such as Trinity or A Mind Forever Voyaging.
Then Curses!/Jigsaw are something else, and Anchorhead/Spider and Web/Inside Woman/All Things Devour are the king of games with thematics you won't see in 3D AAA games in decades.
And over the years the parser from Zork was so improved that could do chained phrases in English in the 90's on a 16 bit machine with the Z5 version of the Z-Machine with games designed for it. For Z8 machine games, the size of the games was even higher with far more objects and interactivity for puzzles thanks to Inform6 and Inform6lib depending on the build target.
Not knocking them - I played the Hobbit on a machine with 48K memory and the game included graphics! It was a marvel of it's day.
Just musing that some of the frustration I found playing them is reminiscent of trying to wrangle many billions of parameter models today.
I played Spanish IF games too from the ZX, but emulated, with PAWS (the adv system) adapted into Spanish. As the English grammar it's simpler than the Spanish one and the words are shorter, you could put tons of in game content and potential actions and effects; that's why The Hobbit shines. Altough further Spanish games were much better, such as Aventura Espacial.