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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."
You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
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!
I am looking forward to this upcoming documentary:
http://www.getlamp.com/
by the guy who did "BBS: The Documentary"
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
"The purpose of learning is growth, and our minds, unlike our bodies, can continue growing as long as we live." - M.J. A
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...
Back in the days, and I don't speak from experience, computers were not for everyone so the market was different. Today, most gamers don't have the patience to read a book, even less to think while doing so like you do in an interactive fiction game. Actually, the whole society is like that. So, shiny graphics ARE important today. I showed some Infocom games to some friends since I thought text adventures were a nice idea and when they saw there was no graphics they simply shrugged them off. Well, one did try Zork, and after a few minutes, he thanked me for showing him something he didn't know and never touched these kind of games after that.
Like Roberta Williams said in 1999:
Back when I got started, which sounds like ancient history, back then the demographics of people who were into computer games, was totally different, in my opinion, than they are today. Back then, computers were more expensive, which made them more exclusive to people who were maybe at a certain income level, or education level. So the people that played computer games 15 years ago were that type of person. They probably didn't watch television as much, and the instant gratification era hadn't quite grown the way it has lately. I think in the last 5 or 6 years, the demographics have really changed, now this is my opinion, because computers are less expensive so more people can afford them. More "average" people now feel they should own one.
I really want to see some level of text based gaming come back.
Text gaming didn't leave, it just went indie. Some of the best works since the Infocom days have appeared in the annual rec.arts.int-fiction competition, the 15th of which is in progress now.
Someone below mentioned Photopia, and that's a good place to start (it took first place in the IF competition nine or ten years ago).
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
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/
I have no sig yet I must scream.