Fond Memories! Revisiting 'Zork': What We Lost in the Transition to Visual Games - Excerpt via The Atlantic

by Philip Bump

What we forget, what was lost with the transition to visual games, is how literary the experience was. A quick catalog of words I learned from text adventures -- mostly from Infocom, the granddaddy of the genre: menhir, footpad, topiary, lapis lazuli. The games were written as much as they were designed; tantalizing adjectives to create a sense of the world, sometimes-obscure nouns to describe things which may not exist in real-life. They sampled from literature as well: one game, A Mind Forever Voyaging, used an excerpt from "The Raven" as an interlude.

via theatlantic.com

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