I’ve recently been finding and buying up old Infocom interactive fiction games or text adventures. Amazingly, there are still brand-new, unopened copies of these games out there, despite at least 20 years having whizzed past since they were released.

Two delights in opening these boxes: the first being the feelies – little trinkets and props that warm you up for the game.

Sherlock – The Riddle of the Crown Jewels arrived today and comes with a fold-out tourist map of 1889 london and a copy of ‘The Thames’, a fake antique newspaper. Lovely.

The infocom gallery has scanned versions of the original box contents for most of the infocom games.

These physical things acted as a form of copy protection: the game would ask you for the co-ordinates of a place, for example, that was printed on the map. But they’re also delightfully made and funny with it.

I wish I saw such love in current games packaging. I no longer eagerly open up console games on the train home from the shops – the contents are invariably charmless, miserable and full of legal warnings and nonsense, even though the budgets for today’s games are so much greater than those of twenty years ago.

The second delight in these decades-old games is brushing up against twenty-year old technology, instructions and marketing. Such gems as:

It is always advisable to make a copy of the diskette that came in your game package… Insert your IBM (or compatible) DOS disk in Drive A and turn on your computer… The SCRIPT command is used to print a transcript of your moves as you play the game on selected printing hardware… /f disables the UNDO feature. This switch is useful on machines with 256 kbytes or less of memory… A clicking sound has been added to the keyboard to make typing easier. Use the volume control on your TV set to control the level of the clicks…

In one of the boxes, there’s an 1980s-colourful leaflet for the Commodore 64, telling me ‘it’s not what you pay… it’s what you get’; in another is an advert for a new digital comic: ‘Lane Mastodon, accountant turned interplanetary hero’.

After all that, the best bit is still playing these excellent games – although I can’t say I play the original versions. Their quaint 5¼″ diskettes are made for long gone systems.

The cheapest legal way to play is probably to get hold of a copy of Lost Treasures of Infocom or one of the other compilations released by Activision after they bought Infocom. You can still find CD versions on auction sites and the like. Then you can play the games using a modern Zcode interpreter. I use Zoom on the Mac, and there are interpreters available for almost any platform you could want.

And, of course, there’s a thriving community making contemporary interactive fiction, most of it for free and much of it as good if not better than the original Infocom titles.

I’m off now to do battle with that bounder Moriarty. The game is afoot!