A History of Early Text Adventure Games

HFKap writes "The earliest computer games were pure text and were passed around freely on the ARPANET, culminating in the 'cave crawls' Adventure and Dungeon. The advent of the home computer opened up a commercial market for text adventure games, though the limited resources of these machines presented significant technical problems. Many companies vied for success in this market, but the best-remembered today is Infocom, founded by a group from MIT. Infocom's virtual memory and virtual machine innovations enabled them to design extremely ambitious and creative games, which they dubbed Interactive Fiction (IF). Ultimately the text game lost its paying customers to the lure of graphical games, such as those produced by Sierra On-Line. This article is a dialogue between Harry Kaplan and Jimmy Maher, editor of the modern IF community's pre-eminent e-zine SPAG."

Comments

It is very dark.

[Anonymous Coward]

You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

IF is not dead!

[santax]

Whenever I go to foxnews I am happy to see there are still many, many very creative people releasing this interactive fiction, complete with hyperlinks to make it interactive leading you to even more fiction. I would say if there is one genre that really stood the test of time. It is IF. Horay!

traumatized to this day

[notnAP]

"Oh look! A rainbow!"
"You are at the fountain."

how i remember text adventures

[keeboo]

I was a kid and I had a bare knowledge of English language as 2nd language, so it went like:

"You start off with your parachute snagged on a branch of a mangrove tree, leaving you helplessly dangling high above the jungle floor."
> north
> go north
> down
> go down
> climb tree
> look tree
> look at tree
> look parachute
> objects
> inventory
> help
> shit
...
> untie parachute

Yeah, sorry if I don't share the same enthusiasm for such games.

Re:how i remember text adventures

[K. S. Kyosuke]

> shit ... > untie parachute

At least you landed into something soft and didn't break your legs, right?

Re:how i remember text adventures

[hattig]

Most adventure games I played would let you survive the parachute fall, but you would then die whatever you did due to a proliferation of lions, tigers, grues, pits with spikes, native savages and ghosts in the immediate vicinity. Naturally the next 23 times you played the game, you'd try and avoid these, instead of "weave parachute into hangglider using tree branches" "glide to remote golden beach that I missed the description of because I didn't 'look into distance'", etc.

Others would give you immediate roaming access to 1048823 locations, and no discernible clue as to what you were meant to be doing. Ooh, I've crashed in my spaceship (had no control over that), and now I'm being pestered by a robot. I've picked up everything loose on the planet, but to no avail. ARGH. KILL ROBOT WITH BANANA PICKER.

Re:Let's see... from memory....

[Psychotria]

south. east. open window. in. west. get lamp and sword. east. up. light lamp. get all. douse lamp. down. west. move rug. open trapdoor. down. light lamp. north. attack troll with sword. again. again. again. again. get axe

Damn you! I've been trying to do this for 20 years and now you've shown me how. You could at least have mentioned "Spoiler Alert".

Re:Let's see... from memory....

[j-stroy]

First, I put on my robe and wizard hat.

Pun alert

[gidds]

"The advent of the home computer..."

Very good, very good...