Andrew Plotkin

Here we go... Announcing the Visible Zorker Project and Patreon! Remember how I did Visible Zork 1 and 2? I'm going to do Zork 3, and then continue through Infocom's entire canon -- in chronological order, one per month. blog.zarfhome.com/2026/01/the-...

Started using FruitMenu Redux (totallynotmalicious.com/software). It's genuinely amazing how familiar it feels, considering how much MacOS has changed since “Unsanity Haxie" was a thing.

I really enjoyed _Nivalis Nights_. blog.zarfhome.com/2026/10/niva...

Voted. (In-person, MA early voting. Went down to City Hall and got me a sticker.)

Part of my literal job is to fly out to physical game studios to rescue and recover historical materials that might be endangered and put them in a permanent archive. @gamehistoryorg.bsky.social is a 501(c)3 publicly funded to do that, my DMs are open, and I'm free for the next couple weeks...

Cyan is doing a kickstarter to reprint the Myst novel trilogy, super-fancy. www.kickstarter.com/projects/cya... blog.zarfhome.com/2026/10/myst...

Here's the text and slides from my Roguelike Celebration talk this weekend: eblong.com/zarf/essays/... The video is not yet up. I’ll follow up when it is available.

I made some little guys during the #roguelikecel talks, for @eblong.com mazes, and @everest.bsky.social’s deep dive into holes

That would be a) do not watch live, b) scrub through the whole video before watching it, c) watch in as small a window on your screen as possible, d) sound off, e) black and white, or better, fully invert your monitor colors; e) upside down; f) run through a blur filter of at least 5% if possible

I am seriously spending so much time in Nivalis.

Just to spread the word, there's a spammer contacting previous IFComp entrants. (Not this year's entrants, but 2025 and going back at least to 2011.) Trying to drum up traffic for his "IF community" Discord server. Short AI-generated queries about each game, faking personal interest.

Twine 2.12.1 is out. It's a maintenance release, but one bug it fixes is a potentially unpleasant security hole. If you have installed Twine (as opposed to using it on the web), please upgrade as soon as is practical. www.patreon.com/klembot/post...

My blog and website seem to have shown up on UK content restriction lists, as seen from iOS. blog.zarfhome.com/2026/10/a-no... If you can’t see the blog post, try here: gist.github.com/erkyrath/c17...

Anatomy of a wild-pointer bug in Infocom's Infidel. Yes, in the released version. I believe this is a brand-new discovery. blog.zarfhome.com/2026/10/infi...

It has been a few years since I remembered to start reading _A Night in the Lonesome October_ on October 1st, so I have just read chapter 1 of _A Night in the Lonesome October_. Out loud. Obviously.

Visible Planetfall is up. eblong.com/infocom/visi... blog.zarfhome.com/2026/10/visi...

And a moving version.

Letter to Mike Ford: Still. It's the twenty year anniversary of the death of John M. Ford. New poem on my Patreon www.patreon.com/bluejo/posts...

www.patreon.com/bluejo/posts...

I've been quoting bits of John M. Ford, who died twenty years ago this morning. blog.zarfhome.com/2026/09/twen... “There's not the time to stand still in the corridor / waiting for life to make sense after all.”

“Spock,” Kirk said, “Spock.” Then, from the heart, “*Spock.*” He held out his arms. "Somebody give the captain a *pie!*” (From _How Much for Just the Planet?_)

Nighthawks is OUT! When the sun sets, outcasts rise. Gather new friends, face old prejudices, and prepare to seize the night in Nighthawks, the vampire RPG where the secret is out... but the hunt continues. Steam: store.steampowered.com/app/1221950/... GOG: www.gog.com/en/game/nigh...

As Order of the Sinking Star is coming out next month, in advance of review coverage coming in I wanted to add one thing to my last statement about the game: bsky.app/profile/drak... (note: at that time I didn’t have a separate personal account)

Yay, 20 More Somehow Even Smaller Mazes.

Thanks to the Somerville Library's online newspaper archive I discovered other businesses in the Hobbs Building when the Somerville Theatre opened Some we knew about, like the bowling alley and the auditorium/ballroom, but nobody knew about the undertaker who maybe worked where theaters 2 and 3 are

But more to the point it obscures what is, in 2026, the key fact about the rationalists, which is that all Yudkowsky's ideas about AI that have filtered out so massively into the American tech industry are complete horseshit and he doesn't know what he's talking about.

It is indeed a good book.

Some recent mystery and puzzle games. (Okay, _This Bed We Made_ is from a couple years back.) - The Mermaid Mask - This Bed We Made - Cognition Method - He Who Watches blog.zarfhome.com/2026/09/late...

The "Adults Only" ranking has been removed from Nighthawks! Everything is set for launch on the 22nd! Phew. What a roller coaster. Thank you everyone for your amazing support while we got this sorted. If you weren't able to wishlist before, now you can! store.steampowered.com/app/1221950/...

I did a somewhat deep dive into the recent OpenAI and Anthropic "hacks" for an upcoming interview. IMO, the AI companies are better off running with the "rogue AI" story because the real story is actually pretty embarrassing. Like making your Wi-Fi password "wifi" embarrassing. 🧵

If anyone has contacts at Valve who can help expedite this, we certainly wouldn't say no to the help. In the meantime, I'll be here swimming in cortisol.

The Visible Witness is now available. eblong.com/infocom/visi... blog.zarfhome.com/2026/09/visi...

at the opening of dollywood some reporter piped up and asked if instead of putting handprints in cement she'd be putting her breasts and she said oh no honey I couldn't I'd be afraid a small child would fall in and hurt themselves and that is how you do it

Multiplayer Twine is in live alpha! Sign up now to get a link. It's like Docs for IF, but fully open-source and self-hostable. docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F... h/t @chrisklimas.com for this awesome collaboration!

Thoughts on Servant of the Lake, the latest Rusty Lake game; and the HIdden Town series, which is basically a Rusty Lake knock-off but I have no problem with that. blog.zarfhome.com/2026/08/rust...

I wrote up tips for saving and loading games durably in Godot. It's stuff I wish I'd known before shipping games on PC: eviltrout.com/blog/2026-08...

I've updated all the Visible Zorker pages to include a search field. You can search for objects, routines, variables, and game text. blog.zarfhome.com/2026/08/visi... Yes, the word “Zork" is temporarily swamped in gaming news due to some FromSoftware article. Big deal.

GDC 2027 page is up. My thoughts: blog.zarfhome.com/2026/08/gdc-... TLDR: “Jeez, if we don't get foot traffic back up at Moscone, we're in trouble.”

Being found in this list is like the complete opposite of showing up in the Epstein files gist.github.com/Hipnosis183/... (h/t @eblong.com's blog here about the fool and his money blog.zarfhome.com/2026/07/the-...)