Interactive Fiction: Enchanter

Channel:

Erifellen

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Published on September 13, 2021 4:00:12 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtG-cJ5NAGI

Game:

Enchanter (1983)

Duration: 15:23

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Text-based interactive fiction, the ancestor of multiple genres, from point-and-click adventure games to MMOs! For this video, I stumble around for a little while in Enchanter, the first game in a trilogy that followed and was set in the same universe as the better-known Zork trilogy.

Infocom in particular was famous for producing dozens of games like these, with a wide variety of settings and themes. The Zork series are your classic dungeon exploration. The Enchanter series changes things up by replacing your adventurer(TM) with a magician. Beyond Zork is more RPG-flavored, using character stats that grow with experience. Wishbringer features a magic stone that can grant wishes. In Ballyhoo, you take a trip to the circus. Deadline and Witness make you a detective investigating a murder, while Suspect switches the roles around and has you trying to prove your innocence to a bungling investigator.

Want some science fiction adventures in space? Try Planetfall, Stationfall, or Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, or Leather Goddesses of Phobos if you're looking for something that's also a bit risqué. Perhaps you're more of a Lovecraft fan? Check out Lurking Horror. Prefer something more lighthearted, featuring puns and wordplay? Nord and Bert Couldn't Make Head or Tail of It! And if you're looking for something particularly unconventional, Suspended puts your character in a stasis chamber, from where you must solve a crisis by acting indirectly through a team of specialized robots that all perceive and interact with the world differently.

Infocom also liked to package various "feelies" with their games, which could be all sorts of game-related objects you could touch and feel (and even smell, in at least one case). Wishbringer came with the magic stone and a copy of the threatening letter that kicks off the adventure, for instance. In some cases, feelies would be integrated into in-game copy protection schemes, like Spellbreaker asking you for information from the included enchanter cards.

I'm putting this video in the PC games playlist because I played the DOS port of the game for the video, but interactive fiction games were available on just about every platform imaginable. We even still have the disks for the Atari releases of a number of Infocom games, though they've probably degraded beyond readability, even if the disk drive weren't broken.

Also, since I forgot to mention it while recording, expect one of those hybrid text/graphical adventure games I talked about for the next time!

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