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."
Best of Memories (Score:4, Interesting)
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 (Score:4, Interesting)
Let's see... from memory.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:how i remember text adventures (Score:5, Interesting)
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...
Is the an English major in the house? (Score:3, Interesting)
If there's an English major in the house: What is it called when an interview consists of one small question, followed by many paragraphs of detailed answer, followed by an unrelated question?
In other words: Is there any sort of descriptive term for "interview by email" which I can learn, so that I can more aptly describe these non-conversations in the future?
They have about as much interaction as an interview might if it were conducted by parcel post. While the monologues contained therein may (or may not be) interesting, the whole thing lacks so much spontaneity and fluidity that I might as well be reading a book.
Virtual archeology (Score:3, Interesting)
There's a guy, Russel Dalenberg, who deals with the "archeology" of the original Adventure game [mipmip.org].
Besides the fact that he had had a great userid ("ged" [wikipedia.org]) when he first emailed me for info about a then-unknown version, I always thought he had the ultimately geeky hobby.
Play IF games in your browser with Parchment (Score:5, Interesting)
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/ [toolness.com]
Re:It is very dark. (Score:3, Interesting)
Which makes this almost obligatory:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nigRT2KmCE [youtube.com]
From everyone's favorite nerdcore rapper, MC Frontalot.
Re:how i remember text adventures (Score:3, Interesting)
That looks like Espionage Island from Artic Computing. It was released initially for the ZX81, then ported to the larger memory ZX Spectrum with no changes - same limited text descriptions in upper case text, limited vocabulary, white text on a black background and so on. Their whole series of games were fairly limited plot-wise, and extremely linear - i.e. just one puzzle to solve at a time for most of the game. So if you got stuck on one puzzle there was no point exploring the rest of the game.
The only advantage that Artic's games had is that they were quick, having been coded entirely in assembly language. Many other games of that era were written in BASIC, and therefore suffered from having slow parsers and logic engines, with some games taking almost a minute to respond to commands. One software publisher went half-way - they coded the vocabulary parser in assembly, but still had the logic in BASIC.
Re:Proof Graphics != Good Game (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Text-based gaming isn't completely dead. There are niche markets, particularly with browser-based games.
... all that stuff is alive and well in this fantasy RPG. They're maybe halfway between pure text and an RPG like Bard's Tale - more interface than the former, much more writing than the latter. Heck, they even have a grue familiar as an homage to some of the classic games. (It's free to play, too. There's a donation model, but non-donators don't miss out on anything.)
One of my favorites, and one I've been playing for more than three years, is Kingdom of Loathing (http://www.kingdomofloathing.com). Yes, they do have images, but they're stick figures, static GIFs, so it's essentially text-based with a little accent. Humorous writing, complicated puzzles
I'd be remiss if I didn't take this opportunity to plug my own game (also free to play, no penalty for non-donators, I assume it's okay to mention here), which is was inspired by Kingdom of Loathing but is a superhero-themed RPG. Twilight Heroes, at http://www.twilightheroes.com./ [www.twilightheroes.com]