The Dysentery Database: Browser Text Adventures

Text Adventures represent the purest and oldest form of interactive fiction. The game describes a location, an event, a fantasy world and provides you with one form of input; a single, blinking cursor.

There is a small mailbox here

Whether you imagine it as a British Postbox or an American Mailbox with a little red flag, whether you imagine it as decaying and weathered or freshly painted – it doesn’t matter, your imagination is your only limit.
Replies are barked back at the game with sometimes only two phrase instructions; a verb parser and the subject. Open mailbox, look at house, pick up toothbrush.

You are likely to be eaten by a grue

The change from text to graphics was never the main course of adventure evolution, nor its eventual death. Even early Text Adventures had graphical representations to help the easily confused and the imaginational impaired.
What really steered the genre’s genetic course was the breakdown of syntax. Look at, explore, examine and inspect paired down to just look at. Hundreds of verbs became Zak McKracken’s 15 and then Fate of Atlantis’ 9. Curse of Monkey Island broke it down to Look, Interact and Talk.

The bear is confused. He only wants to be your friend.

Interactive Fiction, or Text Adventures, are generally considered to begin with Colossal Cave Adventure in 1975. Their death, however, is far less apparent. While Sierra and LucasArts were catalytic in converting type to click, many continued the tradition, and many fans still create text-only adventures to this day.

The simplistic nature of these games means they can be easily replicated in Java or Flash. Many of the most iconic, classic and well loved Text Adventures are free to play on various web museums.

Read on to play Zork, Oregon Trail, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and more, straight out of your web browser.

The Top Text Classics
The best of the best, the creme of the crop

The Oregon Trail
Play The Oregon Trail in your browser

The Oregon Trail was intended as an educational application when it was developed by Student Teachers Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann and Paul Dillenberger in 1971. Little did they know that Oregon Trail would become a cult classic in nostalgic circles, harkening back to their Apple II Youth. The only edutainment I had at school was a stupid turtle that would draw out geometric shapes…

More of a stat tracking, role playing game than an adventure, the long and dusty trail asked its family of five wagon riders to carefully ration food and supplies, hunt for meat and consider carrying spare wagon parts in case of breakdown.

Who would have thought that dying of severe diarrhoea would be so memorable?

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Play the original The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in your browser
Play The BBC’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Remake (with graphics) in your browser

When people say “remember when games were funny?” they aren’t remembering the good old times when Conker threw toilet paper at a giant talk heap of faeces – they’re talking about this game.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide has an impeccable grasp on comedy and never delivers a dud gag. It’s self referential and a parody of the genre, not years after the fact, but when Text Adventures were in full swing.

Inspecting your inventory lets you know you have “a splitting headache” alongside your collection of screwdrivers, toothbrushes and dressing-gown pocket fluff. The game hops between addressing you as Arthur Dent and a computer game player on a whim, perhaps to ask you to shut up because you’re dead and you need to concentrate on rigor mortis.

Zork
Play Zork in your browser

Created by Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels and Dave Lebling, Zork is one of the most well known, highly respected and overly quoted Text Adventure games.

You are standing in an open field, west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here. The adventure has humble beginnings, but you soon embark on a highly ambitious quest, exploring a seemingly endless series of caves where you’ll find such treasures as a golden egg, a clove of garlic and an inflatable boat.

When your friends tell you that you’re likely to be eaten by a grue, they haven’t taken up zodiacal fortune reading, nor are they on grade A drugs – they’re just reminiscing about Zork.

The Hobbit
Play The Hobbit in your browser

Way back when The Lord of the Rings was not a movie, but a collection of connected pages referred to as a “book”, the Tolkien precursor could be found in the form of a text adventure.

Selling over a million copies, The Hobbit was well ahead of its time, offering multiple solutions to puzzles and putting a real-time spin onto a genre established as player driven.

Despite its forward thinking and success, The Hobbit wasn’t devoid of technical limitations; to conserve memory backgrounds were stored as monochromatic line drawings and filled in with colour by the computer. Bugs were also prevalent, the most unforgettable allowed the player to climb into a chest, close the lid, and walk around.

Planetfall
Play Planetfall in your browser

What LucasArts were to Graphical Adventures, Infocom were to Text Based. The eighth game by the company (who were shut down after 10 years of business, in 1989), Steve Meretzky’s Planetfall turned out to be a big success and was in the Top 5 best sellers at Infocom.

The game is known for playing tricks on players with various red herrings; items would be completely unusable in completing the game, despite their difficulty in acquirement.

Colossal Cave Adventure
Play Colossal Cave Adventure in your browser

Considered as the first ever adventure game, Colossal Cave is a spelunking simulator which features famous caves, painstakingly recreated by William Crowther and Don Woods.

Jigsaw
Play Jigsaw in your browser

Often considered one of the best ever Text Adventures, Jigsaw is about collecting puzzle pieces to jump through points of time. It also included a romantic love interest, but she didn’t nag down your cell phone when you’re busy killing gangsters.

The Archive
More classic text adventures to play in your web browser

1972 Hunt the Wumpus	1978 Adventureland
1978 Pirate Adventure	1979 Secret Mission
1979 Space	1979 Space II
1980 Mystery House	1980 Voodoo Castle

Did you know?

Mystery House was the very first adventure game to ever use graphics; plenty followed suit and even updated their old games with visuals. Written by Ken Williams and illustrated by his wife Roberta, the duo went on to create some of Sierra’s most popular graphical adventures such as Kings Quest and Phantasmagoria.

The game was published by hand and distributed in Ziploc bags with photo-copied instructions. Selling through a small software store, the game sold over 10,000 copies for the soon to be legendary developers.

1980 Zork I: The Great Underground Empire	1981 Arrow of Death Part 1
1981 The Count	1981 The Curse of Crowley Manor
1981 Deadline	1981 Escape from Traam
1981 Ghost Town	1981 The Golden Baton
1981 Mystery Fun House	1981 Transylvania
1981 Zork II: The Wizard of Frobozz	1982 Zork III: The Dungeon Master
1982 Arrow of Death Part 2	1982 Circus
1982 The Golden Voyage	1982 Savage Island Part I
1982 Savage Island Part 2	1984 Questprobe – The Hulk

Did you know?

Scott Adams, creator of many Text Adventures from Adventureland to The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai, worked with Marvel to create some of the very first superhero games.

Part of a “Questprobe” series, games were released for The Incredible Hulk, Spiderman and The Fantastic Four. Marvel and Adventure International originally planned to release twelve games based on the comic characters, but couldn’t continue when Adventure International filed for bankruptcy in 1985.

The fourth game was to feature the X-Men, but was canceled when the company crumbled. Partially coded versions of this ill-fated game can be found on the internet.

1984 Softporn Adventure	1984 Sorcerer of Claymorgue Castle