More or less related thoughts; At first I was somewhat surprised to remember that I never played many of the legendary Infocom text adventures. But, in the documentary they mentioned that most of the Infocom games were shipped with additional materials, which added to the atmosphere - and doubled as a copy protection. And, when we were kids we didn't have that much money to spend on games, so we mostly played those illegal pirate copies, which people swapped on floppy disks. And when we got extra money, we bought games of the Ultima series =)

Sami also mentioned that not having access to that many games was one of the reasons why he got interested in programming at the very early stage of his computer hobby. And it was the same for me and my older brother. In a way, one could say that not having access to the Infocom text adventures we went on developing a parser of our own (in C64 BASIC), designing maps and writing some adventures.

Lastly, a 50% tongue-in-cheek and 60% serious answer to the question "where are they now". They are here. (the text adventures. I'd guess the legacy of Ultima series lives on in the contemporary (graphical) rogue-like genre)