Kindle gets text-based adventure games

FTA:<p>"Before computer games arrived on the scene, kids amused themselves with choose-your-own-adventure books that allowed you to explore fantastic worlds that were described without the aid of fancy graphics.<p>"As computers became a little more powerful, these were translated into text-only adventure games that retained the spartan aesthetic, but allowed the player a little more control over their exploration of the world. For example, you'd type "north" to move north, where you'd then "look" around a scene before deciding how to interact further."<p>Uh... No.<p>"Colossal Cave", the first text based Adventure game: 1976, by William Crowther, running on a PDP-10. By '77 it had been ported to Unix.<p>"The Cave of Time", the first Choose Your Own Adventure book: 1979.

Someone correct me if I'm missing something, but this has <i>nothing</i> to do with the Kindle.<p>It's a website that lets you play the games[1]. A minimalist website, <i>slightly</i> more minimal than any I've seen which does this, but a website nonetheless. Any <i>device</i> which has a web browser has access to this website, the Kindle is just an example of one.<p>They could've labelled it for the Nook, or Sony's e-readers, or <i>anything</i>. The iPhone has access to it as well. It's news only because someone decided such websites are worthy of news, and made one into a high-profile example.<p>The only thing which has any relevance to the Kindle is that there's a referral link to buy one on the site.<p>[1]: <a href="http://www.portablequest.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.portablequest.com/</a>

Note that there is already a very high-quality Z-machine interpreter in Javascript available to any device that has a modern web browser (e.g. tablets:)<p><a href="http://parchment.toolness.com/" rel="nofollow">http://parchment.toolness.com/</a>

While we are on the topic of text games, I highly recommend Jason Scott's (textfiles.com, BBS Documentary) documentary on text adventures: GET LAMP<p><a href="http://www.getlamp.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.getlamp.com/</a><p>It might seem expensive compared to the latest hollywood movie but think of it as enabling a computer nostalgist to preserve our history.

If it works for text adventure games, then it will work for the command line, vi and other tools of that era (apart from the missing "ESC" key), with multi-<i>week</i> battery life.

There's a port of Frotz for iPhone / iOS and an app named Twisty on Android that are z-Machine interpreters (so they can play these games offline.)

This might almost be a reason to get a Kindle.<p>I'm a big fan of playing games I find on the Interactive Fiction Archive -- <a href="http://ifarchive.org" rel="nofollow">http://ifarchive.org</a><p>Good stuff.

It would be much better as a kindle app.<p>I applied to enter the kindle developer program, saying I was interested in doing an interactive fiction interpreter, but I've heard nada.

For more Interactive Fiction, including a mirror of the IF archive and Infocom game packages check out <a href="http://guetech.org" rel="nofollow">http://guetech.org</a>

When I was in middle school, someone had a TI calculator that was programmed with a rudimentary choose your own adventure style game. It was really cool!

Here's the website they're talking about: <a href="http://www.portablequest.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.portablequest.com</a>

Did a Hacker News post just give me warm fuzzies...?<p>I think it did.

Sorry to rain on Kindle's parade... but iPhone/iPad has been able to do it since the beginning of time: <a href="http://code.google.com/p/iphonefrotz/" rel="nofollow">http://code.google.com/p/iphonefrotz/</a>

Can you play MUDs from the Kindle?