Infocom's unreleased games

[blueskirt]

I stumbled on this today and while I am not a big fan of Infocom I figured some of you might be.

http://waxy.org/2008/04/milliways_infocoms_unreleased_sequel_to_hitchhikers_guide_to_the_galax/

In a nutshell, somebody managed to aquire a complete backup of Infocom's shared network drive from 1989, containing, among many other things, the source code to all released and unreleased Infocom's games, including Milliways: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, an unreleased sequel to HGttG. Two playable prototypes are available in the article.

[Kweepa]

You're right, some of us are!
This is fascinating, thanks! There goes my Sunday afternoon.

[OneDollar]

That's really interesting, thanks! Especially the notes on design and the comments of the people involved.

[Ghost]

A goldmine of a link, thanks for sharing. Really neat!

[Ali]

The Infocom Classics CD I bought came with text documents outlining premises for un-made Infocom games (which I didn't see mentioned on that link). If people are interested in this sort of thing, I could hunt down the disk...

[Play_Pretend]

That link is really fascinating...those people are the pioneers who inspired most of us, it boggles the mind!

The game download is awful, though...it's literally only about two short,  barely descripted rooms, in the 15th release you can move around to about ten rooms that have no description (just You are at the mountain. and such), and in the 184th release you can only move around to about four, with a teensy bit more interaction.  They're not games at all, just bare skeletons of the start of the game.  A lot of the responses are wrong, too, like if you type "Kiss Trillian" it tells you "He slaps you in the face."  And when you die, the UNDO RESTART etc doesn't work, but they still found time to program responses for if you type swear words.

Still...interesting historical tidbits!

[Eggie]

Very cool.

[Jared]

Erm, wow. The single most engrossing blog post [and comments] that I have ever seen. Just finished reading it and I was on it so long that Nelly Cootalot has nearly finished downloading! (Dialup. )

And I have to say that Michael Bywater's ideas didn't sound that bad to me. I mean, the end seemed a mess, but it would still make an interesting game. I especially liked the stuff about the plant and the radio. Nice and so-lateral-it-hurts-your-brain..