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

Best of Memories

[Anonymous Coward]

I must be getting old. I remember "flashbulb" memories and genuine excitement about Adventure whenever a huge block of text would scroll into the screen, indicating a new area or a puzzle solved. We used a rotary dial phone into a 300 baud acoustic coupled modem on a dumb terminal in 1977. Ah, fond memories of my first exposure to computers.

Long Live Plugh!!!

Proof Graphics != Good Game

[bertoelcon]

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. I really want to see some level of text based gaming come back. Hell it might be a great way to market a Wii Keyboard.

Re:how i remember text adventures

[Anonymous Coward]

I shared your pain with some games, even though English is allegedly my first language. I particularly remember one game where you had to use a vacuum cleaner to get rid of a ghost that was blocking a doorway... I was about 11 at the time, had never even heard of ghostbusters, and didn't realise that people in the US called vacuum cleaners "vacuums" which, according to my dictionary, was something with no air in it. I eventually got past that particular hurdle by pausing the game (it was in basic), reading over the code (I was a nerd) in search of relevant keywords and guessing combinations involving everything I could pick up.

On reflection I suspect reverse engineering this game was more fun than the game itself...

Play IF games in your browser with Parchment

[Robmonster]

I'd urge everyone to give Parchment a try :-http://code.google.com/p/parchment/

Parchment is a project dedicated to running IF games in your browser, and it does so wonderfully. You can even SAVE your progress, and it gives you a bookmarkable URL you can use to resume your game at a later date. That page tells you how to get any Zcode game playable on Parchment, and the page below has links to loads of IF games that have already been made available.

I'd recommend giving Curses a go, although maybe not if you are completely new to IF.

http://parchment.toolness.com/