Enthusiastically Reviewed Text Adventure of the Chicago World's Fair
Available Online for the First Time
Price Reduced to $14.95

An old school text adventure dressed up with hundreds of period photographs and other images, 1893: A World's Fair Mystery takes place at the Columbian Exposition, held in Chicago in that year, the last and greatest of the 19th century's World Fairs. Coupling a well-researched and evocative depiction of the Exposition with interesting puzzles and a mystery to solve, 1893 proves there's life in the text adventure yet. Both fans of the genre and those interested in Chicago's history will enjoy it greatly.

But don't take our word for it: the Chicago Sun-Times called it "excellent," and Adventure Games called it "one of the most fantastic adventure games I have ever played."

Support an Independent Development Project by Pre-Ordering

Derek DiBenedetto of Stormcloud Creations is currently developing a unique RPG/sports management game on a very thin budget, and needs your help to fund development. By buying now (click the Buy button to left), you get access to the game on release (as well as builds during development), plus all patches and support. Manifesto takes 0% of proceeds during the development phase, because we're happy to support this kind of original effort.

The text adventure--once the purview of geeks and computer scientists seeking to push the edge of mainframe computing technology; now an arena for serious writers and academics looking to explore the intersection between literature and interaction.

Case in point.

Book & Volume is a Z-engine game--implemented using the same technology that Infocom used, back in the day. Too retro for the conventional market, but finding another outlet: it's a highly literary work with serious artistic ambitions, recognized by the Iowa Review of all things--a journal you probably have never heard of, unless you are a short fiction writer, desperately trying to find a venue for your work in a world where markets for short fiction are few. And if, say, you are an obscure SF short story writer with credits in the degraded pulps, and find that Z-machine games are appearing in the effing IOWA REVIEW, you think.... Well, this isn't the world I grew up in.

Q: What's Grendel's Revenge?

A: Grendel's Revenge is an online storytelling game created by Worlds Apart Productions in conjunction with Skotos Tech Inc. It first opened for beta release on May 6, 2002. It is a game set in a high fantasy world where monsters are the heroes and evil adventurers need to be put in their place. It contains strong roleplaying and achievement elements.

ASCII Rules OK

Only two games have been on the hard drive of every computer I have owned since I first encountered them: Civilization, and NetHack.

The Zork games are seminal influences on many games to follow, and are the examplars par excellence of the heydey of the text adventure. Purely text in nature, they cast doubt on the very term "video game" -- nothing "video" about them. A description is presented to you; you type in your response (and hope that the parser understands you), grab items, and combine them to solve puzzles. Though derivative of earlier academic games like Crowther's Colossal Cave, they added an element of humor and a puzzle complexity that modern games rarely aspire to.