Some of the first games I played with my father on our Atari 800 were the text adventures created by Infocom. I’ve got mad nostalgia for games like Zork, Enchanter and Planetfall and their interactive stories are just as interesting and engaging today as they were back in the 1980’s. About three years ago I was thrilled to hear that some fella put all the classic Infocom games on a telnet server for anyone to play from a computer on the internet. You could even save your game on his server and come back later to finish. It was probably a major undertaking on his part and I for one played through several games using his server.

I hadn’t visited his site in a while and the other day I got the urge to check out the sequel to Planetfall. When I went there I was met with the following:

November 23, 2004
At Activision’s request, I have shut down the interactive service whereby you could play Infocom games via telnet. If you’re here, you’re probably looking for The Infocom Gallery, which contains scanned images of most of the packaging from the original Infocom games. Activision hasn’t asked me to shut down that site, just the interactive service.

Activision wised up and realized that they were being robbed of millions in potential sales for these games. Text adventures are the new video game craze right now and Activision’s demands are completely understandable. These games are of course readily available at EB Games and GameStop. Valve is also looking into distributing the 17KB Zork series through their Steam delivery service. I smell a major shootout on the horizon between Microsoft and Sony for exclusive rights to these 25-year-old text adventures for their next gen consoles.

Seriously, there were probably all of 50 people using this guy’s server worldwide. I realize this leads into the whole abandonware issue but can’t we cut a little slack for things like this?