My Favorite Games: Riddle of the Sphinx

The featured image for this post (as well as the reminder to write it) is from the Riddle of the Sphinx retrospective video on the Atari Archive YouTube channel. For years, I’ve been remembering Uninvited as the first adventure game I ever really got into. The Infocom text adventures have always been games that I want to like, but I’ve always bounced off them due to my lack of patience. It wasn’t until they started added pictures that the genre really took off for me. But a video about Riddle of the Sphinx, by Bob Smith for Imagic and released in 1982 for the Atari 2600, reminded me that I was completely obsessed with that game for a pretty long stretch. I’m still not certain whether I ever completed it in its most difficult puzzle mode, but my memory is that it had such a hold over me that I wouldn’t have been able to rest until I’d won. The game is presented like a vertical shooter, where you’re traveling through the desert throwing rocks at scorpions and bandits. (I doubt I would…