The Golden Lanthorn

Coming soon for Mac, Windows & Linux

TheGolden Lanthorn

A warm, modern home for classic and modern interactive fiction. Your library on the shelf, maps that draw themselves, and every game's own look.

Z-machine (versions 1–8, including the graphical v6 games), Glulx and Blorb, and Scott Adams adventures.

Coming soon to itch.ioQuestions, or want to hear more? Write to hello@goldenlanthorn.com.

A brass lantern with a lit flame

Real type, real windows. Not a terminal in disguise.

Stories are set in proper book typefaces and reflow to any window. Status lines, menus and forms stay where the game put them. Graphical games keep their own art, drawn crisp at any size.

The Golden Lanthorn playing Lost Pig: Grunk's story in a book typeface on the left, and on the right a map of the rooms explored so far, with the Fountain Room highlighted.
Lost Pig by Admiral Jota, with the map filling in beside the story.

What's in the lanthorn

A library, not a folder

Point it at your stories and they're shelved with covers, authors and details. Browse your folders, sort by any column, and pick up where you left off.

Games in progress wait for you at the top.

Maps that draw themselves

Walk around and the map fills in beside you, room by room, with doors, stairs and one-way passages. Click a passage to follow it.

Layers for different areas, and a table view for mazes.

Hints when you want them

Built-in hint menus and hint files open in a side panel, so a nudge never costs you your place in the story.

The Guiding Light marks the words a game understands.

Every game's own look

The graphical classics draw their own screens: Hybrid for crisp modern text, Raster for pixel-true original art. Pictures and sound play as they did originally.

Game colours, period palettes, or your own theme.

Plays the Infocom classics such as Zork, Trinity, Zork Zero and Journey, plus thousands of free games from the IF community. Bring your own story files; none are included.

A look inside

The library: games in progress at the top with Continue buttons, and below them a shelf of cover art for Counterfeit Monkey, Junior Arithmancer, Lost Pig, Blue Lacuna, Bronze, Coloratura, The Impossible Bottle and more.
The library, with games in progress at the top.
Counterfeit Monkey: the game's own typographic map of the town of Atlantis on the left, and the story text on the right under a status line reading Sigil Street, noon.
Counterfeit Monkey by Emily Short, with the game's own picture window.
Junior Arithmancer with the command tray open: a compass rose, quick words, verbs, and the words the game has shown so far, each a button that fills in the command line.
The command tray: compass, verbs and the words a game knows, one click each. Junior Arithmancer by Mike Spivey.
Lost Pig on a phone-sized screen: the Fountain Room status line along the top, the story text filling the screen below it, and the command line at the bottom.
Lost Pig on a phone: the story fills the screen, with the menus tucked away while you play.

Where to get it

A small one-time price helps keep Lanthorn's development going.

  • itch.ioComing soon
  • SteamLater

Looking for the free, open-source Lanthorn?

The Golden Lanthorn is built on Lanthorn, a free, open-source interactive-fiction player with a TUI: it runs in your terminal. It has the same engine, maps and hints, and it's yours to use and change under the BSD licence.

Find it here: github.com/sharkusk/lanthorn

Contact

Questions, bug reports or press enquiries: hello@goldenlanthorn.com