Retro Game Reviews 5: Hollywood Hijinx
6In this video I take a look at Infocom's Hollywood Hijinx. A piece of interactive fiction, or if you will, a text adventure.
You are the heir to your uncle and aunt's fortune, but you have to stay in their Hildebud mansion over night and find the ten hidden treasures!
Infocom was spearheading the development of interactive fiction games, inventing the Z-machine interpreter that allowed for rapid porting of their games to a wide variety of home computes.
You could use natural language to give commands to the games, and the game boxes contained a plethora of "feelies", background information and hints to set you up in the world of the game.
Frotz Z machine interpreter: http://frotz.sourceforge.net/
Interactive fiction primer: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/gamesblog/2008/jun/09/wikigameaninterviewwithif
How to write your own interactive fiction: https://emshort.blog/how-to-play/writing-if/