>Read Game

If you’re older than about 38, words and phrases like “frotz,” “xyzzy,” “maze of twisty passages all alike,” and “eaten by a grue” trigger sharp remembrance, like Marcel Proust eating a madeleine. You’ll instantly reminisce about text games like Infocom’s Deadline, Suspended, Infidel, Leather Goddesses of Phobos, and a zillion Scott Adams titles from Adventure International. You’ll grit your teeth recalling the hours it took to put the Babel fish in your ear in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. If you’re a male secure in your masculinity, you may even join the manly men who say the death of Floyd the robot in Planetfall was the only time a computer game ever made them cry. —Allen Varney —>Read Game (Escapist Magazine)

I’d replace “38” with about “33,” but this is still an excellent overview. It doesn’t contain any significant original interviews, but the quotations from the games themselves put this article in another category — the author is really putting his money where his mouth is, in terms of his claim that IF is a literary genre with a culture worth exploring.

The article does a good job of sorting through the existing online information and presenting it in a comprehensible way.