Mindwheel (1985)

If you happen to be a fan of text adventures and are looking for something on par with the Infocom games, then Mindwheel by Synapse Software would be an excellent choice. Much like Zork and the other Infocom games, Mindwheel was written to run on a parser designed to be the basis for multiple games. A total of four games were released using this parser (BTZ) and three more were planned.

Mindwheel was released in 1985 for the Apple II, Atari 8-bit (box pictured above), Commodore 64, Macintosh and DOS. Mindwheel and it's successors were published shortly after Broderbund acquired Synapse. This acquisition led to a slight delay in Mindwheel being published. It was originally scheduled to be published late in 1984 but didn't make it out until early 1985. Less than a year later, Synapse was shut down which probably explains why the final three games using the BTZ parser were never released.

The creation of Mindwheel and the history of interactive fiction in general is pretty interesting. A good place for more info is here: http://www.filfre.net/2014/03/mindwhell-or-the-poet-and-the-hackers/

I am not aware of Mindwheel having been re-released but it is easily obtainable for various emulators and can even be played via your web browser here: http://mindwheelgame.com/ (though you can't save).