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A History of Early Text Adventure Games

Posted by Soulskill on from the still-waiting-on-mod-10 dept.

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."

2 of 130 comments (clear)

  1. It is very dark. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

  2. IF is not dead! by santax · · Score: 5, Funny

    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!