I think I’m going to get carried away here, so let me get the facts out up front: GOG.com just posted two new collections from the Activision archives — Police Quest 1 through 4 for $9.99 and The Zork Anthology for $5.99. My favorite line under what’s cool about Police Quest: “Risk not only your life, but also that of your partner.” Put those I care about in danger? Sounds like fun! Anyway, both are on sale now and are cornerstones in the evolution of PC gaming.

Zork, however, makes me want to ramble a bit. I have spoken very fondly about text adventures for years. In fact, when GOG started reissuing Activision games last year, an Infocom collection was one of my hopeful guesses. They were some of my first gaming experiences — just words on a screen and your imagination filling in the gaps, working out puzzles or solving mysteries. Think of a book, then think of yourself starring in it. That’s “interactive fiction,” and the first name in IF is Infocom. Activision bought Infocom in the late 80s (back in the pre-Bobby days, when Jim Levy was the CEO) and has only sporadically released collections of the old games since — once on floppies in the late 80s, again with the advent of CDs in the early 90s, and one final time in 1996 as Classic Text Adventure Masterpieces. I’ve seen CTAM go for $100 online…and to me, that’s a problem.

Found these in a storage area at work recently. Warmed my heart.

As little more than specially-formatted text files, these games are small and they run on anything. I have text adventure apps for my PC, Mac, and iPhone, right now — at any point, I can try to get a little further in Bureaucracy. I played text adventures on my Palm Pilot, for crying out loud. So if they can run on every smartphone in the universe, how come you can’t get them anymore? Well…”now you can” is the best answer I could have hoped for. GOG’s Zork Anthology includes Zork I, Zork II, Zork III, Beyond Zork, Zork Zero, and Planetfall — which isn’t really a Zork game, it’s more of a sci-fi comedy, but it’s one of the best text adventures ever created, and nobody should complain about the lack of Z in its name.

Call of Duty: Black Ops players who poked around the secrets of the game know that you can play the original Zork on the interrogation room’s computer — try connecting a USB keyboard to your console for the full effect. I found out about this easter egg entirely by accident when I posed a jokey question to Mark Lamia at E3 — I quoted the first lines of Zork to all of my interview subjects, just to see if they would recognize it. Mark was the only one who did…and then he almost let slip that it was a surprise in Black Ops. I was then asked to cut that question from the interview and sworn to secrecy, but I was stoked to hear that Zork was coming back in some form — any form! — for gamers to rediscover.

Here’s my dirty little secret: I played a lot of text adventures both as a teenager and an adult, but I never actually finished the original Zork. I got through some of it and then stopped, a few times. I think this is my chance to make good.

A full 13 years after its release — and a full decade after it kind of stopped working with my PC since hardware evolved and drivers did not — Interstate ’76 is finally back, as of today. Go to GOG and download The Interstate ’76 Arsenal, which includes the original game and its expansion, the Nitro Pack, as one collection — for a paltry $6.

That image kind of tells you everything you need to know about the game:

1) Cool cars.
2) With machine guns on them.
3) Add 1 and 2 for explosions.
4) Polygons! Polygons! Polygons!

There is also a great story, excellent voice acting throughout, and an incredible original funk soundtrack. In addition to the car combat, I76 has charm and personality to spare.

I don’t really know what it will be like to play this game again. I hope it holds up, and I think it will. I got completely into it when it came out, but I also came to see it as a symbol of everything that was right with gaming — and everything a game could offer me that other forms of entertainment could not. It was a deep interactive experience — tweaking your weapon loadouts, scavenging parts from destroyed enemies, playing online (oh, dial-up modems, I do not miss you), diving into the game’s fictional but tangible world.

I’m sure everybody out there has that game that gave them that same “games are unique and beautiful things” realization. The main difference for me is that I had already been working in the games media for four years and already felt strongly about the power of games. But I76, if you will pardon the pun, drove it all home for me. It was the total package of what I was personally looking for in a gaming experience, something I didn’t realize how much I wanted until I got to experience it.

So you can either take my ramblings as pure nostalgia, or you can try it out and see if you see what I see. I wrote a proper retrospective on the game (and caught up with its writer and lead designer, Zack Norman) for GOG, which is a little less of a love letter and a little more of what you can expect from it as a game today, and what made it special in the first place.

But for me, I76 is always going to be something like…well, an old girlfriend. I was completely smitten. We spent a lot of quality time together. And I feel nothing but love.

Remember when vampires didn’t sparkle? Back when they were actually more into blood feuds and tracking their nemeses (yes, it’s a word) across continents than snuggling and signing each others’ yearbooks?

No Edward, No Jacob, no whiny Bella

Okay, I forgot all about this gothic 3D RPG from 2000. But I think a lot of fans will be happy to see it, especially if they were into the White Wolf series on which it’s based.

So last week’s announcement of Activision and Sierra titles appearing on GOG.com got me more than just thinking; it got me thumbing through my library going “Oooh, I wonder if they’ll do this one…or this one…or this one.” None of this is inside info — I’m going to have one of the founders of GOG on the podcast this week and he wouldn’t cough up any details — but I couldn’t help myself from doing a speculative wishlist. We know that 20 games are in the first batch; now it’s time to figure out what might appear.

Interstate ’76
Originally released: 1997
Last seen: Upgraded with an expansion pack and fathering a sequel, Interstate ’82

I’ve loudly proclaimed this as one of my top 5 favorite games of all time, so no surprise that this tops my wishlist. The setup: in an alternate past, the gas crunch of the late 1970s has turned to hostile open combat between roving automotive gangs. You’re Groove Champion, whose sister drove with a gang of freedom fighters; now it’s your turn to outfit your car with machine guns, rocket launchers, and other weapons of destruction to avenge her — and maybe save the country from high-octane terrorists while you’re at it. Picture MechWarrior 2 with muscle cars and a funk soundtrack.

This game consumed my life.

Will It Happen?: Since other people remember this game fondly too and it’s totally owned by Activision (no legal hassles with licenses or whatnot — even the funk soundtrack was original music composed for the game), I feel very good about its chances, maybe 3:2 odds. Plus, I really want that to be true.

I’ve always had an affection for text adventures. It’s pure gameplay — just puzzles and prose, no problems with dated elements or graphics drivers or anything like that. You’re the star an in interactive novel. Infocom wrote them in every genre imaginable — sci-fi, fantasy, noir, comedy, romance, horror. Douglas Adams was so taken with the genre that he not only co-wrote the interactive Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but created an original game. Bureaucracy, that has never appeared in any other format.

Will It Happen?: Despite being unfettered by technical limitations like drivers, Infocom games have been out of print for years — and the last collection is only compatible with Windows 95 and Mac OS 9. Clever tech juggling can extract the core files to run through an interpreter, so the tech barrier can be lifted. Activision released the first three Zork games for free some years ago as a promotional move for Zork: Grand Inquisitor, but there are many more excellent games where they came from — and the secondary market is paying way, way too much for legit copies of the old compilations. (When smart people like Ken Jennings are willing to happily resort to piracy to get these things, you know you have a market opportunity — even if he is wrong about Masterpieces being the only CD reissue.) Hell, you can play them at your desk and it looks like you’re working!

Despite the regrettable existence of Magna Cum Laude and Box Office Bust, I’m marking 1996 as the last year of LSL, because after that, series creator Al Lowe was no longer involved in the games. Like it or not, Al made the games what they were — funny, dirty point-and-click adventure games filled with single entendres and low-brow humor. At the time, it was groundbreaking stuff, and it’s still naughty-giggle-inducing today. The series was most recently reissued as the Leisure Suit Larry Collection (which is the only one I was able to track down when I went looking a few years back), but purists clamor for the more complete 4-CD Ultimate Pleasure Pack.

Will It Happen?: With so many reissues in its history, I can’t see why this wouldn’t be a prime candidate for one more. It’s just a question of which games will be included and whether or not they will be bundled. But I personally suspect Larry Laffer will be back in his sleazy leisure suit on GOG.

This is the one game I hear many people saying was a favorite — even inside these walls. You take on the role of a CIA agent trying to unravel an assassination plot. It included William Colby, former director of the CIA, and Oleg Kalugin, former major general of the KGB, as consultants; they also played themselves in the game. Dark, taut, creepy — and mostly devoid of the sexy guns and running around you find in other spy games. This was based on real stuff, like surveillance and interrogation and data analysis. Kind of nothing else like it.

Will It Happen?: This one has a rare combination of mystique and name recognition; everyone who remembers it remembers it fondly, and I think it’s partly because so few games have successfully handled this subject matter. Again, with 3 CDs, it could be a data-packing problem; you’re looking at a 1.5GB download easy. Maybe there’s some better way around this that smarter minds have figured out.

I somewhat controversially called this trivia game show CD “the game of the decade” in a review in the 90s — I was completely floored with the snarky attitude, brilliant writing, and excellent presentation. And almost all the data was audio — the interface was intentionally minimalist, so as to give more space on the disc for the voiceover. There were several sequels, some of which focused just on specific topics like movies and sports. A large part of my PC CD rack at home is occupied by YDJK titles.

Will It Happen?: I’m honestly not sure who owns what at this junction. The developer is Jellyvision, but Berkeley and later Sierra published the games, so I figure any publishing rights would still be with Activision…unless they have all reverted to Jellyvision now? I hate to think that a game as great as this would be lost to the mists of time, so maybe the rights are all easier than I’m assuming. A collection of two or three volumes would be fantastic as a GOG download, I think. Again, there’s lots of audio data; that could be a problem.

I have to admit that I never finished this game when it came out. Roberta Williams was one of the first people to really seriously try to tackle horror (and I say this meaning “as opposed to the schlock that was Isle of the Dead and Harvester) in a serious, narrative setting. It was adult and not for the squeamish; there were several gory and controversial scenes. It also starred a live actor as the main avatar — well, not live, but you know, videotaped and digitized.

Will It Happen?: The game came out on seven CDs — that’s a lot of data, but some of that data was repeated on each disc so you wouldn’t go crazy swapping discs. Still, an FMV game with a large footprint…it’s going to be a task. On the other hand, it’s owned, truly classic, and still spoken of in hushed tones, and Roberta Williams herself says it’s her most representative work.

This is the Roberta Williams adventure game that Bobby Kotick often cites as one of his earliest gaming loves. I don’t even care if it holds up today; bringing this to GOG would just be all kinds of appropriate.

Will It Happen?: Granted, the Apple II graphics don’t look like much today, but if $6 will buy you the iPhone version, why wouldn’t $6 buy you a PC version? Still, I wonder if this is just too old to make the cut for the first batch. I’m not expecting it, anyway.

Everybody says they want to play these iconic point-and-click Sierra games again; I don’t think people realize they already can. I didn’t know until I went poking around.

Will It Happen?: If nobody knows they’re available as downloads already, maybe it’s time to try a GOG re-release. That’s where retro gamers are already looking, right?

Awesome news today for anybody who likes the games of yesteryear as much as I do: GOG.com (aka “Good Old Games”) has been talking about a secret deal for months, and today it can be revealed: the deal is with Activision, and the two companies will be re-releasing some of the PC gems in the Activision back catalog — and that includes stuff from the Sierra library, since that was part of the whole Vivendi/Blizzard deal. The announcement and chatter about it is here.

The first two games are up and ready: the 2001 RPG Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura and 1993′s point-and-click adventure Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Father.

Arcanum. Check out the dialogue options.

Both of these games are perfect examples of why I love GOG: They often find the games that got critical praise but didn’t enjoy the full success they deserved at the time, and this gives them a second chance.

Gabriel Knight. Come for the blood, stay for the excellent characters.

I started buying from GOG about a year ago and I’m a big fan of what they’re doing. I had a giant tub of cherished older PC games in my garage for years, but I finally gave up when I realized I just couldn’t run the things any more. The mid-90s were like the wild West of game development, with 3D cards just emerging as a technology and everybody having different drivers for different hardware…it was kind of a nightmare. Popping those discs into a Windows 7 machine (or frankly, even a Windows XP machine) is often pointless; the tech divide is just too wide. GOG, on the other hand, packages these games so they run perfectly on modern hardware. They’re dead cheap; no game is over $10 so far, and many are $6 (including Arcanum and Gabriel Knight). I’ve also seen special sales and deals that drop those prices even lower from time to time. There’s none of the old-school copy protection/DRM either — no code wheels, no red cellophane secret decoders, no “tell me the name of the fourth word on the ninth page of the manual” stuff. (If you have no idea what I’m talking about, read this.) You just buy it once and you can install it on as many machines as you own. And when you see some of the games in their stable, you’ll probably be surprised — there are as many big smash-hit titles as there are little forgotten gems. That probably sounds like a sales pitch but I assure you it’s really just personal enthusiasm.

So…this brings up a great question. When do I get [favorite game name]? GOG isn’t saying exactly what’s coming next, but they have said that 20 games are in the first batch of this agreement and more Activision games will be released over the course of February, apparently every few days. I don’t expect that to be all 20, but if it’s 10, and then the rest take some time? That’s epic. I am going to dig and see if I can get any info out of them. Also, the site maintains a “most wanted” list generated by its community, so if you are passionate about a game from the past and you’d like GOG to try to reissue it, go here and chime in. I agree with a lot of those top 10s, but I am also begging every man, woman, and child to type in “Interstate 76″ — it’s one of my favorite PC games of all time. You’re lucky I haven’t had the time to go into a giant lovefest blog post about it yet. But I’d also like to hear your wishes in the comments below — what Activision or Sierra games are you hoping will show up as part of this deal?

I’ll be talking a little bit about GOG on this week’s podcast, plus I’ve got a little contest to go with it. Now back to editing said podcast…