Questprobe Featuring Human Torch And The Thin

Year 1985, I'm sitting in front of my monitor typing text commands into a game that promises me I can play as superheroes. Back then, it seemed like nothing short of a miracle. Reality was, as it usually is, a bit more complicated.

Questprobe Featuring Human Torch and The Thing is the third installment in a series that Adventure International created in collaboration with Marvel. The idea was unconventional for its time — taking iconic comic book characters and stuffing them into a text adventure. The series was preceded by entries featuring Spider-Man and The Hulk, so Human Torch and The Thing came as the final chord of the entire project. Unfortunately, Adventure International went bankrupt while still developing planned sequels, so this one remained the last.

The mechanics revolve around switching between two characters — the fiery Johnny Storm and the rocky Ben Grimm. Each has different abilities: Human Torch can fly and ignite things, The Thing relies on brute force. The text parser is standard for a period adventure — you enter commands like "GO NORTH" or "USE FLAME," and the game responds. Character switching was an interesting idea for the time, but in practice it runs into the typical limitations of text parsers from that era — the game doesn't understand everything you want to say, and some puzzles depend on guessing the exact word combination the author intended. That can frustrate you more than any supervillain.

What set the Questprobe series apart was the licensed Marvel material — Stan Lee himself consulted on the script, which was noteworthy in the mid-eighties. The result, however, didn't live up to the ambitions. The graphics are minimalist even by period standards, and the story doesn't match the comic book source material. Today, the game mainly interests collectors of historical curiosities and fans of period text adventures — as an artifact of the crossroads between the comic industry and early computer games, it has its value, but as a gaming experience it's quite a tough nut to crack.

If you enjoy text adventures and don't mind wrestling with the parser, it's a fascinating piece of history — especially when you know the circumstances of its creation. A player expecting action or smooth storytelling will be disappointed. You can play it in a browser today without installation or hunting for floppy disks, which is the one area where 2024 definitively beats 1985.