The Retro Adventurers
Explore classic text adventure games from legendary publishers and authors including Magnetic Scrolls, Level 9, Infocom, Scott Adams, and Interplay. A podcast for fans of GET LAMP, Eaten By a Grue, The Classic Adventurer, Renga In Blue, and Quest For Clues. Follow us on your favorite podcast app, and keep the conversations going on Discord, Facebook, and Bluesky.
Episodes
No rest for retro adventuring news this summer as Tim and Jason bring you lots of news: contest developments (don't delay, some deadlines are very very very soon!), Visible Zorker updates which aren't as stark as they seem, lost games and a lost development environment unearthed, and really quite a bit more.
Special thanks to Andrew Johnson for permission to use ZorkPBX demo audio.
ParserComp 2026 voting closes soon
"I don't want to suggest this is a more obviously American game than some others, but I will say you do solve one problem by shooting a tree." - Dudley of Yesterzine
Jason and special guest player Dudley from the Yesterzine YouTube channel take on two curiosities from the early 1980s. First up is a Spectrum-exclusive adventure with few champions but a lot of rooms: Steve Silver Adventure #1 by Colin Webb and Jim Bennett.
Classic text adventure news so late-breaking that we have to interrupt our news to bring you new news about that news! Presented again this month by Retro Adventurers Nick, Tim, and Jason.
University of Winchester alumnus
https://www.hampshirechronicle.co.uk/news/26175575.university-winchester-alumnus-won-award-game/
ABP: Help preserve Amstrad Infocom interpreter source code!
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1CwYXQ6FiV/
Oo-Topos Co...
Unofficially official text adventure sequels to beloved media properties both published in 1984. That's what these two have in common.
Laugh While You Can, Monkey Boy! because this John Lithgow Appreciation Podcast features Nick and Jason playing the Adventure International-published unofficial sequel Buckaroo Banzai before marching into the world of post-war New York City as imagined in the world of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, ...
Your monthly classic text adventuring news update delivered this month by Jason, Nick, and Tim. The top stories are game contests still open for players votes at time of publication! Don't delay, listen and click today!
Text Adventure Literacy Jam 2026
Iron CHiF Season One Episode Two...
It's an Infocom antiheroic classic and a throwback Infocom parody this time out as modern IF legend Andrew Plotkin (Zarf) joins Jason and Nick for two perilous adventures.
Lurking Horror sendup The Smirking Horror by Jason Davis leads off, a reasonably faithful re-interpretation of The Lurking Horror from Infocom. It's the first Amstrad CPC exclusive on the show and makes surprisingly minimal use of the graphics available in Graphi...
There's news out there in classic text adventures and neo-retro interactive fiction, and it's past time The Retro Adventurers got serious about delivering it! So, welcome to the first installment of a new monthly feature, OPEN MAILBOX -- where you GET NEWS AND LISTEN TO IT.
This episode compiled and presented by Retro Adventurers Nick and Jason covers multiple new Infocom/Z-Machine interpreters, Andrew Plotkin's Visible Zorker deve...
Thank you for another year of Retro Adventuring with us! To celebrate we've gathered together to share important news about a change in the team roster, an exciting new monthly department, and to share a first look at our new handcrafted artwork (thank you, Emily Sergent)!
Spend a little time with Jason, Nick, and Tim and watch for more game, interview, and news episodes coming soon to your feed (and YouTube, which did get sorted o...
Hyperspace adventure awaits as Tim Gilberts joins Jason to play two underrated science fiction games from the 1970s. For starters it's Dog Star Adventure, the first type-in text adventure in Softside Magazine. True to its 1979 roots it's steeped in Star Wars lore and vocabulary, and was ported to plenty of classic platforms in its heyday.
The feature game is Aldebaran III, one of the games created by Peter Langston in his Wander sy...
Ron Martinez, our guest from Episode 11, returns! This is actually a holdover from the 2025 Year-End Chatisode sessions, but it really stands alone as an exploration of Ron's recent work in narrative design involving generative AI, large language models, and other 21st century interactive storytelling techniques. Joining us on the call are regular Retro Adventurers Jason and Nick, along with This Week in Retro's Dave "Velociraptor"...
It's the Infocom classic Zork, but in two unusual formats!
First Nick and Jason explore the unusual covertape edition of Mini-Zork I, a stripped-down, memory-resident version of the original Great Underground Empire created in 1987 and later provided free to readers of the November 1990 issue of ZZap 64 magazine for the Commodore 64. It's a bold undertaking, but is it art? Indeed, does it even work at all?
...Holiday merriment with many past guests and minimal editing!
Retro Adventurers Jason and Nick chat about the year that was including recent developments in classic adventure open source, plans for 2026, and more with many of our past participants:
Robin Raymond, author of Kingdom of the Seven Stones (Episode 9) Tim Gilberts of Gilsoft (Episodes 5, 13, 17, 25) Scott Adams of Adventure International (Episodes 3, 13) Andrew Plotkin (I...
Nick and Jason deliver holiday cheer straight from Santa's Grotto in the form of two 1980s Christmas classics. First up is the bite-sized Quill adventure A Spell Of Christmas Ice by Mike Turner, originally published on the tape-based 16/48 Magazine for ZX Spectrum users. For the main course, enjoy Brian Howarth's very British adaptation of the very American monster mayhem classic Gremlins.
Curl up by the fire with your favorite pic...
No one has reviewed more text adventures and works of interactive fiction over the past decade than MathBrush. A self-described newcomer to the scene he has nonetheless posted over 3,600 reviews and counting of games old and new, along with creating or collaborating with others to create 30 games of his own.
Get ready to type out every letter in "dodecahedron"!
Nick, Jason, and Ben play two games steeped in math, science, and trippy physics in this episode. Beyond the Tesseract by David Lo is the appetizer course, a game originally designed in TRS-80 Level II BASIC, then ported to C and published on a variety of platforms before later being reimplemented in Inform 6 by Andrew Plotkin. A self-professed "abstract adventure", you'll have ...
WE'VE GOT TEXT ADVENTURE SIGN!!
Ben, Jason, and Nick stooge their way through two comedy games. First up is the 1993 Matt Barringer "classic" Detective as put (unofficially) through the wringer of the Mystery Science Theater 3000 crew by CE Forman and a collection of subsequent riffers. One player was (and remains) completely baffled by this format in which a man and two robots are forced to watch a bad movie (slash play a bad game...
Ben, Jason, and Nick set sail for adventures new and old on this episode, starting with 10 CAVE ADVENTURE, so named for the number of BASIC lines making up its entire codebase. They then head to the Commodore VIC-20 for a crack at Young Arthur's Quest before journeying to the not-so-long-ago 2021 release Captain Cutter's Treasure, a neo-retro style adventure created in the PunyInform system.
Ben, Jason, and special guest Dave "Velociraptor" of This Week in Retro take on a double dose of robot-themed games. First up is Souls of Darkon by Andy Walker, published by Taskset and Bug-Byte for Amstrad CPC, Spectrum, and Commodore 64. The robot "Komputa" aids the player on their quest to combat a variety of dread evil forces.
For the main course we take on Epyx's text adventure adaptation of Isaac Asimov's novel The Robots of ...
Creator of games including Hadean Lands, Spider and Web, and Shade, as well as a long-time maintainer of Inform and participant in Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation (IFTF) leadership, Andrew "Zarf" Plotkin was also a teenager once. And back then he wrote Inhumane, as covered in Episode 27.
Jason and Nick welcome him to the program discuss the creation of Inhumane, the evolution of his work as a participant in the modern int...
All the way back in Episode 1 we promised to play Level 9's Knight Orc. Ben and Jason chip away at that obligation by playing... the first of three independent-load sections of the game. (We're working on it!) They do their best to navigate the aptly-named "KAOS" engine and assemble rope. (So much rope.)
But first, a clearout of news and listener mail, and a visit to the wry parody of Infidel, Andrew Plotkin's Inhumane. The game is...
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