Many strange tales have been told of the fabulous treasure, exotic creatures, and diabolical puzzles in the Great Underground Empire. As an aspiring adventurer, you will undoubtedly want to locate these treasures and deposit them in your trophy case.

The Wizard appears, floating nonchalantly in the air beside you. He grins sideways at you.

The Wizard incants "Fantasize," but nothing happens. He shakes his wand. Nothing happens. With a slightly embarrassed glance in your direction, he vanishes.

Expect the unexpected when you take on Zork II: The Wizard of Frobozz.

As you explore the subterranean realm of Zork, you'll continually be confronted with new surprises. Chief among these is the Wizard himself, who'll constantly endeavor to confound you with his capricious powers. But more than that, you'll face a challenge the likes of which you've never experienced before.

An old, oddly youthful man turns toward you slowly. His long, silver hair dances about him as a fresh breeze blows. "You have reached the final test, my friend! You are proved clever and powerful, but this is not yet enough! Seek me when you feel yourself worthy!"

Zork III: The Dungeon Master draws you into the deepest and most mysterious reaches of the Great Underground Empire. Nothing is as it seems. And the one responsible for the shadow and darkness - the Dungeon Master - embodies the greatest mystery of all.

In this test of wisdom and courage, you will face countless dangers. But what awaits you at the culmination of your odyssey is well worth risking all.

Dread times have befallen the Kingdom of Quendor. The wizards have mysteriously disappeared. The Enchanter's Guild Hall lies in ruins. Villages are abandoned, drunken men mutter strange tales, and vicious monsters haunt the streets and wastelands. Now it falls to you, a lowly peasant, to unravel the meaning behind these ominous events. Will you accept the challenge?

Of course you will. For you're a hardy adventurer, ready to confront the most fearsome foe. And in Beyond Zork, you have an arsenal of new weapons and abilities at your disposal.

Venture into the depths of "Colossal Cave Adventure," an iconic text adventure game that takes you on a thrilling journey through a mysterious cave system. In this pioneering classic from 1976, you'll find yourself immersed in a world of vivid descriptions and challenging puzzles. As an average player, prepare to exercise your problem-solving skills as you navigate through a text-based interface, unraveling the secrets hidden within the cave's depths.

With no shortage of surprises and enigmatic encounters, "Colossal Cave Adventure" offers an immersive experience that will transport you back to the early days of interactive gaming. As you explore the intricately crafted passages, you'll encounter cunning puzzles that demand your wits and creativity. Engage in a battle of wits with the game's cleverly designed obstacles and overcome them to uncover the cave's ultimate secrets. Whether you're a nostalgic adventurer seeking a taste of gaming history or a newcomer eager to delve into the origins of interactive storytelling, "Colossal Cave Adventure" will test your skills and captivate your imagination. Get ready to embark on an unforgettable expedition into the heart of text-based gaming.

Don't Panic! Relax, because everything you need to know about playing The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is contained in the pages of this manual. In this story, you will be Arthur Dent, a rather ordinary earth creature who gets swept up in a whirlwind of interstellar adventures almost beyond comprehension.

As the story begins bulldozers are waiting to reduce your house to rubble to make way for a motorway bypass. While you attempt to deal with this problem, your rather strange friend Ford Prefect drops by to tell you that the Earth is about to be demolished to make way for an interstellar bypass! If you survive this double threat, you'll embark on a series of inter-galactic misadventures even funnier than your worst nightmares!

A special note for people who have read the book "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy". Although the opening of the game is fairly similar to the book, the story quickly diverges, with lots of new material and different twists. Although familiarity with the story may make a few of the early puzzles easier, if you rely too heavily on this previous knowledge you will certainly end up getting misled.

IMPORTANT! Our records show that you do not have a license to operate this software. Normally, you would be required to complete a License Application Form and mail it (with proof of purchase) to our Licensing Department, and then wait the customary four to six months for processing.

Luckily, for your convenience, we have, at the last minute and at great expense, installed a remarkable new on-line electronic application form on this very disk, which will be processed by our modern 24-hour computer service moments after you fill it in.

Bureaucracy! Everyone, at one time or another, feels bound up in an endless swathe of red tape. In Bureaucracy, best-selling humorist Douglas Adams draws on his own battles with beadledom to create a hilarious misadventure. You'll find yourself in the midst of a bureaucratic muddle so convoluted that you can't help but laugh.

You've just landed a great new job and moved to a spiffy house in a nice little town. You're even being sent to Paris this very afternoon for a combination training seminar and vacation. What could possibly go wrong? The answer, of course, is everything. When the bank refuses to acknowledge your change-of-address form, you'll find yourself entangled in a series of bureaucratic mishaps that take you from the feeding trough of a greedy llama to the lofty branches of a tree deep in the Zalagasan jungle.

"Join the Patrol, and see the Galaxy!" You took the poster's advice, bait and all, and marched right over to the recruitment station near your home on the backwater planet of Gallium. Images of exotic worlds, strange and colorful aliens, and Deep Space heroism had danced in your head as you signed the dotted line. And since that day the closest you've come to Deep Space heroism was scrubbing down the radioactive leper colony on Ishmael-3.

But suppose that jumbo fortune cookie you got at Qwang's Take-Out Asteroid last shore leave was right. Maybe you will indeed narrowly escape disaster. It's even possible that you'll actually travel to an unknown corner of the Universe, where you'll save a doomed planet - or die in the attempt. In fact, we'll guarantee it - every crumb of it - because that's just the way the cosmic cookie crumbles.

What a trotting krip! Since your incredible heroics in Planetfall, where you risked life and limb to save the planet Resida, things have hardly changed at all. Sure, you were promoted to Lieutenant First Class, but this only meant that your dull life of cleaning grotch cages was replaced by an equally dull life of paperwork. Now you've got another assignment tailor-made for a grotchbrain: pilot a spacetruck to a nearby station to pick up a load of trivial forms. Trot and doublt trot!

But all is not lost. By a happy twist of fate, your companion for the journey is your old pal Floyd! That's right, it's the same mischievous little robot, crayons and paddleball at the ready, who was your helpful buddy in Planetfall.

Getting to the space station is easy. But once there, you find it strangely deserted. Even the seedy space village surrounding the station is missing its ragtag tenants. A spooky alien ship carrying only an empty pedestal rests in a docking bay. An ostrich and an Arcturian balloon creature are found, abandoned but in perfect health. The commander's log describes the mysterious breakdown of machiner, demonstrated by a roving hull-welder who seems bent on your destruction. And finally even Floyd begins acting oddly...

"Will you read me a story?"

"Read you a story? What fun would that be? I've got a better idea: let's tell a story together."

Late Thursday night. You've had a hard day and the last thing you need is this: shopping. Luckily, the place is pretty empty and you're progressing rapidly. On to the next aisle...

Aisle started out as a game which would not need the usual meta-verbs... i.e. a game with only one turn. The initial idea was: How do I make a game with only one turn interesting? Give it lots of endings--in fact there are many 'endings' and (hopefully) every sensible action results in an 'ending'. There is no winning action. There is however more going on than just this and the more endings you see the more things should become clear.

You take a deep breath of salty air as the first raindrops begin to spatter the pavement, and the swollen, slate-colored clouds that blanket the sky mutter ominous portents amongst themselves over the little coastal town of Anchorhead.

Travel to the haunted coastal town of Anchorhead, Massachusetts and uncover the roots of a horrific conspiracy inspired by the works of H. P. Lovecraft. Search through musty archives and tomes of esoteric lore; dodge hostile townsfolk; combat a generation-spanning evil that threatens your family and the entire world.

Pig lost! Boss say that it Grunk fault. Say Grunk forget about closing gate. Maybe boss right. Grunk not remember forgetting, but maybe Grunk just forget.

Calm down. All you have to do is write a thousand words and everything will be fine. And you have all day, except it's already noon.

The Dreamhold is interactive fiction — a classic text adventure. No graphics! No point-and-click! You type your commands, and read what happens next.

The Dreamhold is designed for people who have never played IF before. It introduces the common commands and mindset of text adventures, one step at a time. There’s an extensive help system describing standard IF commands, as well as dynamic hints which pop up whenever you seem to be stuck.

I’ve tried to create a game which rewards many species of adventurer: the inexperienced newcomer, the puzzle-hurdler, the casual tourist, the meticulous explorer, the wild experimenter, the seeker after nuances and implications.

As "Curses" opens, you're hunting about in the attic of your family home, looking for a tatty old map of Paris (you're going on holiday tomorrow) and generally trying to avoid all the packing. Aunt Jemima is potting daisies and sulking; the attics are full of endless distractions and secrets; Greek myths, horoscopes, sixth-century politics, a less than altogether helpful demon, a mysterious bomb plot, photography, ritual, poetry and a dream or two all get in your way; and somehow you keep being reminded of your family through the ages, and all its Curses... ...could it be that even you are Cursed?

And now... the next exciting episode of humanoids in space!

How did you, a regular at Joe's Bar in Upper Sandusky, Ohio, end up on a Martian moon? Can you prevent the hideous space creature from abducting the naked heiress? Why does scratch 'n' sniff no. 2 smell so familiar? How many uses can you find for a rubber hose? Is it easy to remove a brass bikini? Is it hard to outsmart a robotoid sumo wrestler? Can you stop the Leather Goddesses' fiendish plan to turn all Earthlings into sex slaves?

Learn the answers to these burning questions in Leather Goddesses of Phobos, Infocom's racy spoof of 1930s pulp fiction. But first, a word from our sponsor:

Why put up with only one playing mode, when you can have three? That's right, three! So whether your tastes run to Tame, Suggestive, or Lewd, Leather Goddesses of Phobos can satisfy you!

The phone rings.

Oh, no — how long have you been asleep? Sure, it was a tough night, but... This is bad. This is very bad.

The phone rings.

Now everyone is gone. (Well, almost everyone.)

A new, experimental game that has no puzzles but uses only words that change your focus on things, thereby adapting the story.

The beautiful life is always damned, they say. As for you, you've overexpended yourself: fifteen years of prominence, champagne, carriage rides in the Tuileries, having your name whispered behind, manicured hands, getting elegant ladies out of elegant fixes - and you're in debt. Bound by oath and honor to a pack of scoundrels.Your father, old peasant that he was, could have warned you against their type.

When the seventh day comes and it is time for you to return to the castle in the forest, your sisters cling to your sleeves.

Housework is only as dull as your imagination. Join Emma, six years old, on a playful adventure of peculiar proportions.

This game is a joke. This game is a warning. This game is a satire. This game is inspired in equal parts by Vaclav Havel's "The Memorandum" and Hunter S. Thompson's "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas". This game is a big, stupid shaggy dog story.

Can you help one hungry bulldog in his quest to find something good to eat? He would like that. A lot.

Starcross, Infocom's science fiction mind-bender, launches you headlong into the year 2186 and the depths of space. And not without good reason, for you are destined to rendezvous with a gargantuan starship from the outer fringes of the galaxy, peopled with both harmful and helpful beings. But the great starship serves a far larger purpose than mere cultural exchange. It bears a challenge that was issued eons ago, from light years away - and only you can meet it.

The first time I ever saw someone play a text adventure was in fifth grade. One of the sixth-graders didn't go to outdoor ed, and therefore spent the week in my fifth-grade classroom, playing Scott Adams's Impossible Mission on a TRS-80 while the rest of us did our schoolwork. At recess we crowded around him and shouted out commands to try. I really wanted a turn at the keyboard, but this guy wouldn't let anyone else near it. It would be another couple of years before I played a text adventure myself.

My big chance came when my father signed up for the Dow Jones online service, which offered not just stock listings but sports scores, movie reviews, Grolier's Encyclopedia, and a small selection of games, among which was Adventure. A bargain at a mere $144/hour! (In 1984 dollars!) Fortunately for my father's bank account, I eventually learned about Orange County's free BBSes, most of which were WWIV boards written in Pascal. Borland's Turbo Pascal let you swap in external modules called "door games," some of which were text adventures, and I've had the code to a few of these kicking around for (ulp!) a quarter of a century now. For a long time I've thought that it might be kind of fun to port one over to Inform, and I finally found the time to do so. Warning! These things were not exactly up to Infocom standards, let alone those of the modern day. This is a nostalgia project. Swords, trolls, magic spells, hit points. But no acoustic coupler necessary!

A small, slightly surreal romp through an underwater seabase, which could be taken straight out of a James Bond movie. With it's weak old school two word parser, it may seem dated by todays standards, but it has a certain weird humor, and it may appeal to fans of old 8-bit adventure games.

"You, Ed Lines, the famous reporter, have sent the "SUBSUNK" message from the stranded submarine "SEA-LION" only to have it intercepted by enemy agents. The enemy agents use a mysterious magnetic force to draw the sub into "SEABASE DELTA". You must unravel the secrets held in the base then locate the mini-sub and make good your escape."