Interactive Text Adventure for your Kindle/E-Book

September 28, 2010 5:35 PM

Interactive Text Adventure for your Kindle/E-Book
Many people cut their teeth on the imagination fueled text adventures games released by Infocom back in the eighties. Whispernet combined with the handy keyboard and the limiting browser made the Kindle perfect for a text-based adventures. We programmed an interface specifically for the Kindle that lets you play a handful of the Zork-like adventures that we spent many of hours of our youth. Save game is supported so you can come back at a later time without restarting. Let us know what you think and how we can improve it!
posted by edman (7 comments total)

This project was posted to MetaFilter by Vectorcon Systems on October 6, 2010: Interactive Text Adventure for Your Kindle/E-Book Reader

Makes a nice complement to Parchment, which is all recent IF rather than the Infocom classics. However Parchment uses a (very long) unique URL system for save-games and I don't know how well that works on the Kindle. (I don't have one, but it's this sort of thing that makes me want to change my mind.)

Are you planning on adding any modern z-machine games to your site?
posted by theodolite at 8:23 AM on September 29, 2010 [1 favorite]

Hi Theodolite, it doesnt look like parchment works on the kindle. the site pulled up, but didnt show all the story selections. It works great on a regular browser though. We're looking at putting more modern z-machine games. thanks for your input.
posted by edman at 10:58 AM on September 29, 2010

this makes me so happy.
posted by sawdustbear at 2:21 PM on September 29, 2010

I don't have a kindle, but I support this project. bravo.
posted by Think_Long at 6:10 PM on September 29, 2010

This is great! It's making me wish choose your own adventure type books would be feasible as kindle ebooks.
posted by jzed at 8:33 AM on September 30, 2010

Nice, but it uses numbers for the menus. The new Kindle doesn't have number keys. You need to pop up the SYM menu then scroll around like you're entering your initials into Donkey Kong. Numbers are bad.

jzed: They should be. Kindle supports hyperlinks within documents so I can't see why a Choose Your Own Adventure would even be challenging to make. You'd need to create it in mobi format but otherwise it shouldn't be hard.
posted by chairface at 9:07 PM on September 30, 2010

Garth Nix wrote a short Choose Your Own Adventure-style game called Down to the Scum Quarter. It's been published in book form, but on his old website had it in HTML form. It's disappeared from the interwebs, but Archive.org still has it.
I packed it up at one point into a Plucker format (for my Palm V!) and it worked great. I'd bet it would work on a Kindle, but as I don't have one I can't test it.

Does anyone know of any similar games that are completely static HTML pages?
posted by BungaDunga at 7:18 PM on October 6, 2010