Where to find games

The Golden Lanthorn is a player, like a music player: it includes no games. You bring your own story files.

That's less work than it sounds. Thousands of text adventures are free to download, many of them among the best ever written, and the Infocom classics can still be bought legally. Once you have a file, add it to your library, or add a game straight from IFDB or a web link inside the app.

Free games

IFDB, the Interactive Fiction Database

ifdb.org is the catalogue of interactive fiction: tens of thousands of games with reviews, ratings, recommended lists and download links. It's the best place to start if you don't know what to play. The Golden Lanthorn uses IFDB for the covers, authors and ratings in your library, and can add a game to your library from its IFDB entry.

The IF Archive

The IF Archive has been the community's library since 1992. Its games folder holds Z-machine (zcode) and Glulx story files going back decades, including Scott Adams' adventures.

itch.io

Many authors publish new interactive fiction on itch.io, some free and some paid. Look for downloads in .z5, .z8, .ulx, .gblorb or .zblorb; those will play.

The competitions

The yearly Interactive Fiction Competition (IFComp) and other community events publish dozens of new free games each year, and IFDB lists them all. Past winners such as Photopia (1998) and Coloratura (2013) are a good way into modern favourites.

The Infocom games

Infocom's games are still owned and sold, so they aren't free to download. Legal ways to play them:

• The Zork Anthology is sold on GOG.com and Steam. It includes Zork I, Zork II, Zork III, Beyond Zork, Zork Zero and Planetfall. The games inside are Infocom's own story files (ending in .dat), which you can add to your library.
• The original boxed games, and the Lost Treasures of Infocom and Classic Text Adventure Masterpieces of Infocom compilations from the 1990s, turn up second-hand. If you own the disks, The Golden Lanthorn can play images of the originals directly.

The original source code of Zork I, II and III was released under the MIT licence in November 2025, in the historicalsource repositories on GitHub. It's source code, not a ready-to-play game: build it into a story file with the ZILF toolchain first, and The Golden Lanthorn plays the result.

Scott Adams' adventures

Adventureland, Pirate Adventure and the rest of the Adventure International games are found on the IF Archive in their classic .dat form. Original disks for the Apple II and Commodore 64, including the illustrated S.A.G.A. releases, play too.

A few to start with

All free, all well loved, and all on IFDB: Lost Pig (a funny, short first game), Counterfeit Monkey, Anchorhead, Photopia, Spider and Web, Galatea, Blue Lacuna, Coloratura, Kerkerkruip and Junior Arithmancer. See what it plays for the full picture.