A History of Early Text Adventure Games 130
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."
Documentary (Score:5, Informative)
I am looking forward to this upcoming documentary:
http://www.getlamp.com/ [getlamp.com]
by the guy who did "BBS: The Documentary"
Yes and no... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Proof Graphics != Good Game (Score:5, Informative)
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 [ifcomp.org], 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).
Here in the UK. (Score:5, Informative)
Here in the UK there were a good number of such games published during the 8-bit micro boom of the early 1980s.
The first game to really start things going was Melbourne House's The Hobbit which, on some platforms, included crude graphics for some of the locations. The parser for this game was quite complex, allowing the player to pass instructions on to other characters. The other characters in the game also had some form of artificial intelligence, granting them the ability to wader around at random and move things around. Consequentially no two games were ever the same.
Another significant developer was Level 9 who created huge games using text compression. These were sold for a huge range of platforms.
Another major development was when Gilsoft developed The Quill, a an adventure game construction kit. This allowed virtually anyone to create a game based around a standard runtime environment. Many games were then released to the market, some so cleverly constructed that major software publishers could pass them on at full price. Later add-ons were created that allowed in-game graphics, basic sound effects and other features. Text compression was eventually added, too.
Re:OT: Can someone ID this game? (Score:3, Informative)
Inform (Score:2, Informative)
There is an excellent tool for writing IF that a friend brought to my attention a while back. It's called Inform 7 [inform-fiction.org].
I have tinkered with it a little bit, and it makes writing IF much easier. It takes out most of the programming skills, and focuses on a pseudo-natrual English way of writing the game.
Re:Proof Graphics != Good Game (Score:1, Informative)
Don't support that game.
The developer stole the DikuMUD code and started "accepting donations" for it, which is not allowed under the Diku license.
Everything about that game is a farce. Illegal and unjust.
google medthievia for more information.
Re:Just telling my girlfriend about text adventure (Score:3, Informative)
It's a shame these sort of interactive fictions passed away after the advent of the CD-ROM and Myst.
You should look into some of the newer, highly rated works at IFDB [tads.org]. There is a small but active community still developing these games, and each year sees one or two new gems that rival or surpass the most popular efforts of the Infocom era. The best days of the format may well be ahead of us.