Where to find games

The Golden Lanthorn is a player, like a music player. The full app includes no games, so you bring your own game files. The free demo comes with Zork I.

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. You can search IFDB from inside the app and download a free game straight into your library, add one from a web link, or add a file you already have.

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. You can search it from inside the app and download free games into your library, and a game's manuals, feelies, solutions and maps from IFDB can be saved to its Documents tab.

The IF Archive

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

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.

Support IFDB, the IF Archive and IFCompAll three are run by the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation, a non-profit.

I have paid off a troll, been robbed by a thief and fed a cyclops a lunch I would not wish on anyone. The Foundation is the first of them to give me anything back.

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 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 game 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. Source code needs building into a game file with the ZILF toolchain before it will play, and The Golden Lanthorn plays the result.

The free demo of The Golden Lanthorn includes the whole of Zork I, built from Infocom's source code, which Microsoft released under the MIT licence.

I could have told anyone how Zork worked. Nobody asked. Now anyone can read the source, and still nobody asks me.

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.