I used to love playing the Synapse Software text adventures on my C64 back in the day: Mindwheel (1984), Essex (1985) and (my personal favorite) Brimstone (1985). Synapse built a really great text parser for them called BTZ (Better Than Zork). It worked differently from Infocom’s and seemed to understand (or at least pretend to understand) just about everything you typed. The games came packaged with beautiful hardbound mini-novels written by professional authors. These served to set up the story, as well as providing copy-protection.
Brimstone was sort of a surreal tribute to Dante’s Inferno and King Arthur. It’s beautifully written, but pretty hard to describe. I found a good review of it here, and they even tell you how you can play it now:
http://www.filfre.net/2014/03/essex-and-brimstone/