> never been a AAA game

Infocom sold 450k copies of Zork I and 250k copies of The Hitchhiker's Guide among their many other titles.

Beam Software sold over 1M copies of The Hobbit.

Sierra On-Line sold ~400k copies of King’s Quest VI in a week.

Indeed.

"Thorin sits down and starts singing about gold" or "You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike"

became early memes as a result.

However those memes also come from player frustration of being stuck in repeated patterns. The same can also happen with chat interfaces to LLMs.

However I'm not sure whether that's a function of the chat interface or the nature of LLMs.

If you think the Infocom games were like Zork I-III you don't understand how the ZMachine itself was improved over the years upon creating masterpieces such as Trinity or A Mind Forever Voyaging.

Then Curses!/Jigsaw are something else, and Anchorhead/Spider and Web/Inside Woman/All Things Devour are the king of games with thematics you won't see in 3D AAA games in decades.

And over the years the parser from Zork was so improved that could do chained phrases in English in the 90's on a 16 bit machine with the Z5 version of the Z-Machine with games designed for it. For Z8 machine games, the size of the games was even higher with far more objects and interactivity for puzzles thanks to Inform6 and Inform6lib depending on the build target.

Not knocking them - I played the Hobbit on a machine with 48K memory and the game included graphics! It was a marvel of it's day.

Just musing that some of the frustration I found playing them is reminiscent of trying to wrangle many billions of parameter models today.

I played Spanish IF games too from the ZX, but emulated, with PAWS (the adv system) adapted into Spanish. As the English grammar it's simpler than the Spanish one and the words are shorter, you could put tons of in game content and potential actions and effects; that's why The Hobbit shines. Altough further Spanish games were much better, such as Aventura Espacial.

Those games did not have a high enough budget to be considered AAA.

And did the concept of "AAA" truly exist back then? Let alone "AAAA"? It's not really a good benchmark, imo.

I'm the last person to propose more LLM usage, but there is a reason DnD has exploded in popularity in recent years despite fancier games and graphics existing, and it's not because people find text/story telling restrictive on an immersion or technical level. If a Zork was released today with a hypothetical adaptive parser with world coherent output (big ifs) I think it'd be a huge hit personally. Though to be clear, I'm not saying someone could build it on an LLM.

As long as people still enjoy books I believe they will still want to interact with it if possible.

All of this subthread comes from an attempt to refute the statement, "Considering there has never been a AAA game of that genre...".

Never is a long time. However, now we're arguing the counter-examples aren't "AAA games".

>Never is a long time.

It is bounded by the time AAA games became financial viable to create.

False. Tons of games in the 80's and 90's where stupidly cheap to create and still AAA games on their own.

That's just their nature: they are very inexpensive to make. The original question was whether people find them fun and engaging. Clearly they did in the past. Though nowadays their standards have risen a lot. Even graphical adventure games (like Monkey Island) have long fallen out of favor due to a lack of action elements.

>never an AAA game

From the non-Infocom titles:

- Curses!

- Jigsaw

- Anchorhead

- Slouching towards Bedlam

- Spider and Web

and literally dozens more of outstanding quality.

From Infocom, most titles will qualify.