A Grue in Starbucks
Earlier today I stopped by a Starbucks in Albany, NY while waiting for my girlfriend’s class to end. Not far from where I sat, a twenty-something-year-old man sat at a table with his Apple laptop, scribbling on some sheets of paper.
Certainly that describes a large percentage of the Starbucks clientele, but I’ll risk it and say that this guy was probably the only person using a PowerBook 180 circa 1992.
I talked to him briefly before leaving; he was playing the Infocom text adventure Suspect. In it, you play as a costumed partygoer who is suspected of the murder of another guest. The Starbucks adventurer was carefully drawing out the room layout as a graph of connected and meticulously labeled boxes, trying to get his bearings in the virtual environment woven by text.
I used to play other Infocom mystery games when I was younger, though the only one I ever beat was Moonmist1. That said, I recently downloaded A Mind Forever Voyaging on James’s recommendation; I’m using DOSBox to run an old copy of it since my ICBM can’t run the Classic version he sent me a while back.
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Trivia: At the very beginning of Moonmist, a character asks you what your favorite color is. Invariably, the guest bedroom is painted that color (what a coincidence). But don’t think that choosing blue over yellow is inconsequential — it actually determines the solution of the mystery! ↩
June 13th, 2008 at 10:07 am
The old Infocom games are great. The packaging for the games was quite fantastic as well. If you haven’t heard, there is a documentary about text adventures coming out called Get Lamp.
June 14th, 2008 at 1:22 am
Do yourself a favor and check out Daniel’s blog, where he has collected a number of old Infocom packages, including the box art for Suspect and Moonmist. I wish I were old enough to get the full effect of nostalgia.