Gaming Text Adventures - superjamie/lazyweb GitHub Wiki
Text Adventures
A type of video game popular on home computers and mainframes before graphics were good, or before graphics were even possible. The game describes a scene to you using words and you imagine it in your mind. No 3D acceleration required. Weird, right?
"Text adventure" is an old term. I remember an MS-DOS-based golden era of text adventures written either individually, or in crap limited parsers like AGT or TADS. These days this genre is called "interactive fiction" and seems to be mostly written in Inform or Twine by a close-knit community full of in-jokes and the same dozen or so people all making games at each other.
You can find more games at:
- IFDB - Games for Beginners - Influential Games
- IF Archive
- MobyGames - DOS - Text Adventure/Interactive Fiction
- Infocom's Games - generally considered the masters of the trade in their time
Here are some "text adventures" I know and like. You might not like these and think they are crap. That's probably expected these days.
- McMurphy's Mansion by David Martin (1984) - MobyGames - Internet Archive - IFDB
- Planetfall by Steve Meretsky (1984) - MobyGames
- A Mind Forever Voyaging by Steve Meretzky (1985) - MobyGames - IFDB
- Alice in Wonderland by Robin Johnson (1989) - MobyGames - Internet Archive - IFDB
- Glowgrass by Nate Cull (1997) - IFDB
- SanctuaryRPG by Black Shell Media (2015) - Steam - Website - MobyGames
- Decade by Graeme Borland (2015) - itch.io
- Horror in the Darkness by Karmic Shift Studios (2016) - All games on Google Play
- Seedship by John Ayliff (2017) - itch.io - Google Play - MobyGames
This genre led into "graphic adventures" like Space Quest (Sierra adventures) and Day of the Tentacle (LucasArts adventures). Another modern take is "visual novels" which are more like branching choose-your-own-adventure stories, sometimes without any choices (which is called a "kinetic novel").
Some games which blur the line between "text adventure" and "visual novel" are:
- Digital: A Love Story by Christine Love (2010) - Website
- Localhost by Aether Interactive (2017) - itch.io
Here are some things which aren't quite text adventures or any of the above, but I'm including them here anyway: