so funny listening to the spiderman ep, feel like I must be the same age as most of the panel (i know I'm a bit younger than Jeremy and a little bit older than Bob) got into comics right before the Image exodus, and the spiderman #1 Todd McFarlane was well adorned on the walls of every comic shop in CT.
I'm a bit of text adventure aficionado, so I'd like to comment on the questprobe/scott adams stuff.
First, while not a total donk like the funnies guy, he did become a pretty right wing religious guy later on, making bible software and the like. Also, the questprobe stuff was some of his only graphic stuff and some of his worse. You guys mentioned the Hulk game, to turn into the hulk you have to type, if I remember correctly, "bite lip" so dumb. His games were simple but very portable, they were on so many systems, and sometimes he had such little memory to work with he had to cut down the meager descriptive text to the bone. That didn't stop The Count from using the concept of time in an interesting way, or Adventureland presenting a stripped down version of Adventure/Colossal Cave that was still fun and memorable. Mystery Fun House even had multi-step puzzles playing out in a fun house/spy dead drop scenario.
As for the second person voice, that's very, very common for IF, and while Infocom, Sierra (or online systems) and Scott Adams are perhaps the most famous, there were a lot of big publishers back then (and even later, Magnetic Scrolls made amazing and beautiful text adventures across the pond along with Level 9.) Stateside we had Phoenix, Sirius, Penguin, Sir-Tech (wizardry!) all had text and graphic adventures, and high output.
also the first ~108 issues of Ultimate Spiderman is a blessing. It's great, myth-y, and practically 100% self contained and features the same writer/artist.
