I've been looking for the rabbit hole my entire life. I haven't found it yet, but I did come across this little gem from the 80s.
Alice in Wonderland; a text-based computer game from a company called Windham Classics that made several text games based on classic books.
Text games occupied a rather narrow window of the PC gaming world, and this release date of 1985 would be smack in the middle of that window. Infocom itself would have been going strong around this time. More of these games were published than I ever realized and there's still some folks my age who like to dig these things up now and then, so let's take a look at a great piece of abandonware:
It starts in a typical fashion with Alice, her sister and Alice's cat (which you can rename to, say, "Swiss") sitting on a river bank. After playing only a few short moves, I noticed a couple of things about this game:
1. Alice can die. While not unheard of in text games (you were more likely to simply get stuck), it is a little unusual, maybe especially for one based on Alice.
2. You have to go "off the beaten path" several times in the game, especially at the beginning to find the rabbit. This makes sense in retrospect, but I found it counterintuitive during the game, especially since there is no clue from the game that you can in fact go, for instance "north" at certain times. In addition to this, there is an area in Wonderland where Alice can become "lost" with no way out except for a reload. These two features made for a couple of frustrating sessions.
The game does follow the book somewhat, but not too closely, nor should it be expected to. Most of the characters from the book are here including the mock turtle, the gryphon and, as previously mentioned, Dinah the cat (and that other cat too).
The is a "hint" feature which really isn't as much help as you might think, and there are a couple of product placements that I found, well, curious. The potion that Alice drinks to grow is, for some reason, relabeled Pepsi in this game and there is a crock of Grey Poupon to be found too. What's it for? Beats me. There's more than one mention of mustard by the other characters, but I never could find a use for the GP. Does it go in the soup or do you give it to the dormouse? I don't know, and I'm afraid that I simply was using the wrong string of words in my many mustard experiments. I never could finish the game either, though the hint feature told me I was close. I managed to find the missing Dinah, but I'm hopelessly stuck in a spot that at least looks to be near the end. And like any good text game from the mid 80s, I'm confident that I'm not the first (or last) player to find myself in this spot.
Knowing the book is helpful, but the instructions state that it's not required. I'm sure that's true, but knowing when to type "cry" would seem to require either a knowledge of the story or at least having the Wikipedia article open in another window.
The bottom line for this game is simple. If you're an Alice AND text game fan, then this is something that is definitely worth a peek. While people with those two interests may fill a small niche, I think that they, like the text games themselves, are more numerous than I realize.
