Infocom was a small company in Cambridge, started by people from MIT, and between 1980 and 1989 it made games out of nothing but words. You read a description, you type what you want to do in plain English, and the game tells you what happens. The best of them were written as carefully as good novels, and they were funny, and they were fair. When you got stuck, it was almost always because you hadn't looked closely enough, and when you got unstuck, you felt clever, which is a rare and valuable thing for a game to do for a person.

And then there were the boxes. Infocom put things in them. A pair of cardboard sunglasses. A glowing stone. A little bag of pills from a crime scene. Some of them you needed to finish the game, which kept people from copying the disks, and some of them were simply there to delight you. I'm a librarian. Of course I keep them in acid-free folders.

Planetfall (1983, Steve Meretzky). You're a lowly ensign in the Stellar Patrol, scrubbing decks, when your ship blows up and you land on a deserted planet. There you meet Floyd, a small robot who wants nothing more than to follow you around and play games. If you've played it, you already know why it's here. If you haven't, I won't say a word, except to keep a handkerchief nearby.

Trinity (1986, Brian Moriarty). A game about the atomic age, and the most beautiful thing Infocom ever made. It's strange and sad and full of wonder, and it ends up somewhere real. I play it every few years and it gets better as I get older, which is the test I use for books, too.

A Mind Forever Voyaging (1985, Steve Meretzky). You are a computer, the first one ever to become aware of itself, and you are asked to live inside simulations of your town years and decades in the future, to test a politician's plan. There are hardly any puzzles. You walk the streets and you watch things change. It's the only game I've ever played that made me want to write my congressman.

Plundered Hearts (1987, Amy Briggs). A swashbuckling romance. You play a young woman in the 1600s who sails for the West Indies because her father is ill, and before long there are pirates. It's tremendous fun, the heroine rescues herself more often than anyone rescues her, and it is the only Infocom game written by a woman on her own. I wish there had been a dozen more.

You don't need an Apple II, or a yard sale, or my shelf. Two collections put the games back in print:

The Lost Treasures of Infocom (1991), with a second volume the year after. Most of the games on floppy disks, with the manuals gathered into a book. You won't get the feelies, of course. Hitchhiker's isn't in either volume.

Masterpieces of Infocom (1996), which puts nearly all of the games on one CD-ROM for Windows and DOS. This is the one I'd hand a patron who asked me where to start. Look for it in the bargain bin at the computer store. That's where I found mine, for less than the price of a hardcover.

The old story files will also play in the free programs people have written to run them, on almost any computer you own. More about that on the new interactive fiction page.

Stuck? My hints page gives a nudge first and lets you decide how much more you want, with the answers printed the same color as the page. I borrowed that idea, with gratitude, from Delia Shapiro's Page by Page, which gives the same kind of gentle hints for Myst and Riven and hides its answers the same way. If you're lost on an island instead of underground, go see her.