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

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

[beatbox32]

That's the one I remember playing a lot on my C64.. "You wake up. The room is spinning very gently round your head. Or at least it would be if you could see it which you can't." For those interested, you can play it online here: http://www.heavygames.com/hitchhikersguidetothegalaxy/gameframe.asp

I disagree

[aepervius]

I used to belong to that demographic long long ago. But with age I simply lost patience and reading too much from a computer screen is tiring. We were young. Now we are at best middle aged, at worst seniors. Most of us do not want or cannot waste as much time on tiring task. Even if the new demographic of young people was coming in, we a bit older would not want to go through that again and again. The myth that now people only accept instant gratification is just a myth. Many of those I.F. were simply cumbersome and unforgivable but since this is all we had, we accepted it. Most people would not willingly eat stale moldy rotten bread if fresh bread is available. You do it only when there is no fresh bread available and you are starving. Same for the first graphic+novel type of adventure like KQ's. We will not willingly go again in that especially eating the cake right off the start breaking down the game.

Maybe they can revive I.F. as type of ebook. But I doubt it.

Re:I disagree

[Gulthek]

Who said it needs reviving? The best IF games have come out in the last few years! Playable on anything digital that even remotely makes sense: from a computer (any reasonable OS) to an iPhone.

Re:I disagree

[Beetle B.]

Many of those I.F. were simply cumbersome and unforgivable but since this is all we had, we accepted it.

You may not know this, but by today's IF standards, the Infocom games are considered to be quite poor in quality (although few will utter such blasphemy without a lot of modifiers...).

Everyone agrees that they did have great prose and suspension of disbelief was not at all difficult. That's to their credit.

But game design? Mediocre at best (again, by today's standards). Each Infocom game I played had a dungeon/maze element that was quite tedious. I suppose it's because I never had the manuals.

Each Infocom game I played suffered from "I forgot to pick up an item a hundred moves ago and now I can't finish the game, and I don't even know that I can't!". Today, this is just considered poor design. A well designed game will not allow the game to progress, and will provide proper clues to help you figure out what you may be doing wrong.

Each Infocom game I played had ways to die that a real person in the world of the game has no way of knowing would kill him. That's considered poor design today. There should always be some clue that what you're about to do is dangerous, and dying and restoring shouldn't be the only way to know.

Some Infocom games I played had this whole "starving to death" notion that thankfully has been deprecated today. They were hard enough already, damn it!

Sysadmining with Infocom

[Dare]

As a newbie sysadmin, I feel I'm living in an Infocom adventure for some reason. Here's a write-up of my work day about a week ago.

Re:And this describes most games today

[Elrond, Duke of URL]

pretty much all the first person shooting games have this at their core.

The basics of gaming hasn't changed in over 30 years. Shortcuts, Mindless violence and the feeling of victory when you eventually "win" - which lasts all of 20 seconds until it gives way to the hollow feeling of "well, what now?"

You really should have picked a better example for your rant, I'm afraid. Just because somebody can do a speed run of Zork doesn't mean that's how you play. First off, Zork is by no means a violent gorefest. It's a game of exploration and treasure hunting. If you play using this minimal set of moves, you've neither truly played the game nor have you achieved a remotely good score.

The truth is that games have changed considerably in the past 30 years. Sure, there were lousy games back then, just as there are now, but they were an entirely different kind of lousy. Usually they were, in my opinion, of the insanely difficult and un-fun type of lousy. There's a lot less of those these days since insane levels of difficulty cause most gamers to do a 180 right quick.

Not a single mention of MUDs???

[Viol8]

All that discussion and not a single mention of MUDs, MOOs or any online multiuser text based adventures! Does the fact that they're running on a remote server and have multiple users somehow exclude them from being designated as text based IF? I think not. If anything they're far more imaginative and far longer player commitment than most single user adventures running on the local machine.

Re:Proof Graphics != Good Game

[westlake]

This should stand as proof that graphics should not be in the forefront of the entire gaming industry, they had graphics then and did much better giving a fully descriptive story as was needed

The dialog and descriptions were not always as good as you remember them.

The more important lesson to be learned from Infocom - and the best graphical adventures - is that they were willing to explore and exploit any environment and any popular fictional genre.

Detective story, police procedural. Lovecraftian horror. Traditional, hard core Sci-Fi...