Andrew Plotkin (Zarf) writes about interactive fiction, Infocom history, rule-based programming and tools such as the Quixe interpreter.
HN commenters recommend his interactive fiction game Spider and Web as a great starter game, and link his Infocom catalog and other work.
Infocom adventure games are some of the grand-daddy's of text adventures.
Zork is by far the most well known, but also pretty infamous are Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Leather Godesses' of Phobos and A Mind Forever Voyaging.
As a warm-up, I'd recommend Moonmist. It's a mystery game listed as a "Beginner" game, and is great for introducing elements of the Infocom system.
The feelies are available to view here:
https://gallery.guetech.org/greybox.html
There are a collection of game files here:
https://eblong.com/infocom/
My preferred player is still Frotz. It compiles and runs on practically anything, my Psion, my Pis, Windows, everything.
https://gitlab.com/DavidGriffith/frotz
Huh? Inform 7, the primary authoring tool for interactive fiction, can compile games to a a static webpage out-of-the-box. It's had this capability for years.
Andrew Plotkin, featured in this submission, wrote the Quixe interpreter [0] for this purpose, which is bundled into Inform 7.
The Interactive Fiction Database [1] has—again, for years—an instant "Play Online" button on the listing of any supported game, powered by Parchment [2], which is even older than Quixe.
You must not have checked very thoroughly.
[0] https://eblong.com/zarf/glulx/quixe/
[1] https://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=2xyccw3pe0uovfad
[2] https://iplayif.com/
Awesome, thanks. I was getting some sort of version error with the game file I was trying, but https://eblong.com/infocom/gamefiles/zork1-r119-s880429.z3 did the trick (renamed to zork.iml and copied into the vm).
Also in case anyone else is new to simh, you put the files in question in a folder then run path/to/pdp11.exe wherever simh installed it. CTRL+E is how you suspend the VM and can give it further commands from a simh> prompt, then the 'c' command to continue. Once inside the pdp11 vm "DIR" to confirm the stuff you're copying actually exists.
I've actually never gotten anything like this running before, very cool.
I'm a bit sad that Undum [0] didn't receive attention [1] that Twine did. I think it's more (arguably the most, to date) modern and user-friendly take on interactive fiction, which should have long since moved to the web, like these two platforms show us.
[0] http://undum.com/
[1] Here are all three interactive pieces made with Undum:
* The Play, A dress rehearsal gone horribly wrong, by Deirdra Kiai http://squinky.me/theplay/
* Almost Goodbye, by Aaron A. Reed http://almostgoodbye.textories.com/
* The Matter of the Monster, by Andrew Plotkin http://eblong.com/zarf/zweb/matter/
You can go one step further on Windows and compile the games from source!
You'll want to use ZILF
https://virtuallyfun.com/2019/04/17/so-the-infocom-source-code-base-was-just-released/
This site has a far more extensive and interesting list of the Infocom games
https://eblong.com/infocom/
As for simh I did keep binaries on the old sourceforge page ( https://sourceforge.net/projects/simh/ ) although it's not the aggressive new one on github. I know people cry about sourceforge but they went under new management years ago and fired everyone responsible for that piggyback fiasco.
If you enjoyed this, you might like Mind Chess, which can be played without a board and pieces [1]:
Consider Mind Chess. Two players face each other. One says "Check." The other says "Check." The first says "Check." This continues until one of them says, instead, "Checkmate." That player wins -- superficially. In fact, the challenge is to put off checkmate for as long as possible, while still winning. This may be better stated: you truly win Mind Chess if you call "Checkmate" just before your opponent was about to.
[1] http://www.eblong.com/zarf/essays/mindgame.html