Fortunately, interactive fiction is inexpensive and fairly
easy to find. You can buy most of the best commercially published interactive
fiction, for both PC and Macintosh computers, in one magnificent collection called The Masterpieces of Infocom.
The Infocom Home Page
offers advice on how to purchase this collection and other Infocom products.
However, Masterpieces has become quite difficult to find in the
last few years. One company that still offers it is the British firm
Interdata Developments, on the web at http://www.lacegem.com/
The price, after conversion from pounds to dollars and shipping costs, is
around fifty US dollars. Currently, Interdata is sold out of Masterpieces;
but the collection is often available on ebay.
It is also possible, though not really legal, to download all the
Infocom stories from the web. Those who offer the stories in this
way often include disclaimers like this one, from Achim J. Latz:
"Copyright by Infocom, Inc. Provided for non-commercial use only, with the sole intent of making information available that would otherwise be lost.
To whomever presently holds the copyright to the information contained in this page: if you think the existence of this page violates your copyright,
please complain to achim@latz.org and this page will be removed."
Newer
interactive fiction, as published on the Internet, is mostly free, though you have to
know a bit more to get it to work. To run one of these stories, you usually need two
pieces of software on your computer. One piece of software is called an
interpreter. The interpreter you need for a particular story depends mainly on two
factors, the kind of computer you have and the tool the author used to create the
story.
Each Internet-distributed story recommended on this site was created with one of
four tools. These tools are called Inform, TADS, Hugo, and Adrift. Interpreters for
stories made with these tools are available for just about any kind of computer, even older, more unusual
computers. If you have one Inform interpreter, one TADS interpreter,
on Hugo interpreter, and one Adrift interpreter on your
computer, you have enough interpreters to run all the stories recommended on this
site. However, some other stories require other interpreters.
To run a story, you need, in addition to an interpreter, a story file. The story
file you need depends only on which story you want to run--it doesn't matter what kind of
computer you have.
So, if you want to read The One That Got Away, using a Macintosh, you need the
right story file and the right interpreter, which, in this case would be a TADS
interpreter for the Macintosh.
You can find links to plenty of interpreters and story files at the Interactive Fiction Page, but you'll have to
know a little bit about downloading and decompressing files to
make them all work.
Newer computer operating systems make decompressing files quite easy, by
showing compressed files as folders that can be opened like other folders.
Trying IF Online
You can save yourself the trouble of downloading by reading some of the IF
stories recommended here online, using this link.
It is possible, though unlikely, that the online versions may not work with
your Web browser. Also, you may find that the stories are slow to
respond to your input, especially when they first start. Depending on
how your Internet access works, you may find that you cannot save your
progress in an online story.
Using a Starter's Kit
If you prefer to run IF stories on your own computer, you can simplify matters by downloading an Interactive Fiction
Starter's Kit from Fredrik Ramsberg's Interactive Fiction Site or from
the site you're viewing now. Fredrik's kits
are available for most kinds of computers and include interpreters for both Inform and
TADS. Even with Fredrik's kits, however, you will have to know how to decompress
files. Fredrik's site also includes very thorough instructions
for using all kinds of interpreters and story files.
If you would like to try some of the freeware stories recommended on "Fun
and Learning With Interactive Fiction, you can download a kit containing
many of them, along with the interpreters you
need to play them on PC-style computers. To use this kit, create a
directory for it on your computer's hard drive and then download the kit,
using this link. The kit is about nine megabytes in size.
Next, go to the directory you created, and open, or unzip, the file you
downloaded. It's called kids_kit.zip.
Once you have opened, or unzipped, kids_kit.zip, run the program called
Pcmenu.exe. This program will offer you a choice of eighteen IF
stories. To play one of the stories, type in its number and press
the Enter key.
For a description of the stories, see the "Top
Fifty" list on this site.
Finding Story Files
If you would prefer to find the individual story files for yourself, rather
than using a kit, you can easily do so. All are available at the
IF Archive site, though it's easier to
find them if you use Baf's Guide to the
Interactive Fiction Archive.
If you try to download these game files from your World-Wide Web browser, you will
probably find that the browser will display some meaningless characters on the screen,
rather than saving the file to disk, as you would want. In order to force the
browser to save the file to disk, click on the file with the right mouse button, if you
have a PC, or hold the mouse button down for a few seconds, if you have a Macintosh.
Interpreters That Don't Need Decompressing
If you really don't want to learn about decompressing files, you can download
jzip.exe, a
plain MS-DOS Inform interpreter, using this link. It will
take only a short time to download jzip.exe. This link will bring you
documentation for jzip.exe. The easiest way to use the jzip interpreter is to
put it and the story file you want to use into the same directory. Then, in that
directory, type the name of the interpreter, followed by the name of the story file.
If your story file, for example, is called bear.z5, you would type
jzip.exe bear.z5
Similarly, you can download the two necessary parts of tr.exe, a TADS interpreter for
MS-DOS, using this link and this link.
It won't take long to download this file, and you can use it for TADS stories the same way
you use jzip.exe for Inform stories.
Jzip.exe and tr.exe will run on just about any computer that uses MS-DOS.
Adventure Blaster: A Great Way to Get a Fast Start
A good IF-playing tool for Windows 95 users is
Eric O'Dell's Adventure Blaster,
which is now in its final version. Adventure Blaster makes it easy to play ten fine
IF stories, though some if these tales may not be suitable for kids. Adventure
Blaster does not require that the user know anything about decompressing files, but it is
quite large (about three megabytes), so it will take some time to download if your
Internet connection is not especially fast.
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