http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=21848
http://www.legendsofzork.com/
I don't know about you, but I'm ready for some grue grinding.
Being a complete Infocom fanboy - who cut his gamer teeth on old adventure games for the PC - this has made my morning. I've never cared for how Activision has managed Infocom's games.
I don't expect Activision to give out games for free, even old text adventures, but I'm still clueless as to why they went out of their way to acquire Infocom's catalog just to completely abandon these titles.
Why these games haven't shown up on Gametap, Steam, or Good Old Games is beyond me. Even with PDF scans of the original packaging and a compiler to run the games, these titles would take up only a few megs of server space a piece. Even though I own every Infocom text adventure - save for Leather Goddess of Phobos, which, for some reason, I refuse to download illegally - I would pay for them again if the price was acceptable, in order to get high-res scans of all the packaging, maps, and manuals.
So it's nice to see that Activision is finally doing something - anything - with this property. If Legends of Zork can capture that old Infocom feeling and create an enjoyable MMO, then I will happily give them way too much of my spare time.
Even though there are a wealth of big PC-exclusive releases this year - including Dawn of War II, Dragon Age: Origins, Starcraft II (maybe), and Diablo III (maybe) - there are several casual, play for free titles, like Zork and Battlefield Heroes and Quake Live, coming out that may get a lot of gamers like me who have jumped ship to the consoles back in front of their keyboards for more than just e-mail, Facebook, Hulu, and porn.
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