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.