A Mind Forever Voyaging

A Mind Forever Voyaging (henceforth AMFV) was an interactive fiction game designed and implemented by Steve Meretzky and published by Infocom in 1985. The name is a reference to a quote by William Wordsworth: "Newton — a mind forever voyaging through strange seas of thought...alone." Unlike most Infocom games, AMFV was not a puzzle game, having only a single puzzle near the end of the game. Also uncharacteristic of Infocom games, and Meretzky's in particular, was that the game had a serious tone and also a political theme. The game is among the most respected, though not the best-selling, Infocom has ever published, and was the first of the "Interactive Fiction Plus" line, meaning it used version 4 of the Z-machine and required at least 256 kilobytes of RAM.

The player controls PRISM, the world's first sentient computer, in the year 2031. The economy of the United States of North America (USNA) is failing, and a new arms race, involving nuclear weapons no larger than the size of a common pack of cigarettes, threatens to turn the USNA into a police state. PRISM lived 20 years as a simulated male human named Perry Simm (which sounds like "PRISM" when said quickly). The player may control this alter-ego through Rockvil, South Dakota, in simulations of the future in order to test a new government plan.