I still have the Lost Treasures of Infocom on my palm and play all the time and see Steve Meretzky one in a while at the PostMortem game dev meetings here in Boston, very funny guy. I can't tell you how many times I have had to explain my "It is dark, you are likely to be eaten by a grue" T-shirt to people under 30 or over 40, seems it is a 10 year window where we were obsessed with text adventures.
The text adventure scene is still pretty active with the inform interpreter still being used and the new TADS interpreter. There is a lot of great home-brew text adventures out there. You can get most of them here
ifArchive.orgIf anyone is interested I added text-to-speech to the WinFrotz interpreter to help blind gamers play the old text adventure games without the need for screen reader software, you can check it out here:
ifTTS, here is an example of the start of
Zork II.
If you enjoy the NerdCore stuff and MC Frontalot check out this site:
http://www.rhymetorr...com/disc1/index.html, especially
Kill Dash Nine by Monzy, which is one of my favorites, with lines like this, how can you not like it:
You’re running csh and my shell is bash,
You’re the tertiary storage; I’m the L1 cache.
I’m a web crawling spider; you an Internet mosquito;
You thought the 7-layer model referred to a burrito.
You’re a dialup connection; I’m a gigabit LAN.
I last a mythical man-month; you a one-minute man.
It’s like I’m running Thunderbird and you’re still stuck with Pine,
Which is why I think it’s time for me to KILL DASH NINE.
