Raspberry Pi: A Quick-Start Guide, 2nd Edition (2014)

Chapter 8. Play Games on Your Pi

Linux has never been a popular gaming platform. Even though the situation has improved over the years, it probably will take some time for the first blockbuster titles to become available. Still, you can already play some entertaining and sometimes even addictive games on the Raspberry Pi.

For example, you can enjoy thousands of text adventure games on the Pi. Although commercial publishers abandoned this genre long ago, it still has an active and enthusiastic fan base that releases new games frequently. And if you haven’t played classic games such as Zork, you should give them a try.

Another classic genre is point-and-click adventure, including games such as The Secret of Monkey Island and Day of the Tentacle. Thanks to the efforts of the open-source community, you can play most titles on your Pi.

Even if the Pi isn’t powerful enough to run modern games, it still has enough power to run some native Linux games, such as Quake III. It even has enough power to emulate some home computers and game consoles from the past. For example, on the Pi you can play all games made for Atari’s VCS 2600.

Play Interactive Fiction

Text adventure games were very popular with users of the first home computers. In contrast to modern games with spectacular 3D graphics and surround sound, text adventures look very spartan. They output only text, and you control the game by typing commands on your keyboard. Here you can see the opening of Zork, one of the most famous text adventures.

Don’t be misled by the game’s presentation. Many text adventures tell great stories and can entertain you for hours.

Even though no commercial text adventures have been released for decades, the genre still has an active community that produces exciting games. Most of these games tell long and elaborate stories, so their authors prefer to call their creations interactive fiction.

Infocom was one of the first companies to produce interactive fiction. They created some of the greatest text adventure games. The Infocom developers realized early on that they could reduce their efforts by creating a domain-specific language for describing interactive fiction. They called this language Z-language, and authors of interactive fiction still use it today to create games.

To run programs written in Z-language, you need an implementation of a virtual machine named Z-machine,^[88] and one of the best is Frotz.^[89] You can install it as follows:

To play a text adventure using Frotz, you need only the game’s Z-language file. A great place to start your search for interactive fiction is the Interactive Fiction Archive,^[90] which hosts thousands of games.

If you’re new to interactive fiction, you should start your journey with the Zork trilogy. This series of games made Infocom famous, and although they are a couple of decades old, they are still as fresh as they were on their first day. Meanwhile, they are available for free,^[91] so download Zork I ^[92] and start it as follows:

This invokes the Z-machine interpreter and runs the game stored in ZORK1.DAT. You might need a few moments to get used to this kind of game,^[93] but it’s certainly well worth it.

If you enjoy playing interactive fiction, you might also enjoy creating it using today’s tools. It’s really easy,^[94] at least on a technical level. You still have to come up with a compelling and original story, though.

Play Point-and-Click Adventures

Another genre that has always been popular is point-and-click adventures. In these games, you control the main character using the mouse. You can make the character move to a certain place on the screen by clicking the place, and you can perform actions by clicking the action’s name on the screen. Popular point-and-click adventures are The Secret of Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, and Maniac Mansion.

There has always been a demand for new point-and-click adventures, but very few have been released over the last several years. The big publishers didn’t believe in them and preferred to release countless first-person shooters, such as Call of Duty and Battlefield, instead.

Tim Schafer, one of the creators of The Secret of Monkey Island, got frustrated by this situation and tried to raise some money on Kickstarter.com to fund a new point-and-click adventure. He raised more than $3.3 million and proved that people are still very interested in this genre.

Similar to text adventures, most point-and-click adventures run on a virtual machine. The most popular one is SCUMM, which stands for Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion.

Originally, it was created by the developers of LucasArts to implement the game Maniac Mansion, and they have used it to implement many other games since.

The ScummVM^[95] project implements a virtual machine that interprets SCUMM games, and it’s available for free. You can install it as follows:

This will install not only ScummVM, but also two great games you can play with it. These games will appear in the Games section of your desktop’s Start menu. In the following figure, you can see Beneath a Steel Sky.