A short time ago, Pac-Txt made the rounds, billing itself as a text adventure adaptation of the famous arcade game. The problem is, Pac-Txt is lousy. It's a conceptual piece that takes advantage of none of the features of interactive fiction (IF), like good writing and interesting puzzles.

Fear not though, IF arcade fans. A number of years ago a few key players in the IF community came together to create IF Arcade, a set of clever and well-written arcade-to-IF adaptations. Games represented include Centipede, Donkey Kong, Joust, and Pong.

An excerpt from Adam Cadre's excellent Pac-Man IF, after the jump.

Intersection The streets are all the same, dark alleys with glowing borders keeping the riff-raff like the Pac-Man away from the Elect and their pleasure palaces. Here two of them cross, paths stretching into the darkness in all four directions known to mankind.

"Need to get well," Pac-Man mutters, shivering. "I just need to get well."

There is a food dot here.

> eat dot
Pac-Man chokes down the food dot.

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