7 ms·

50 Years of Text Games – A 2021 Journey from Oregon Trail to A.I. Dungeon

152 points by homarp 6y ago

kcartlidge 6y ago
I spent many hours creating games using the Graphic Adventure Creator. Despite it's name it was really just text adventures but with the occasional slowly-drawn static scene. Also a big fan of Level 9 and Infocom, though the only one of theirs I ever completed was the Leather Goddesses of Phobos. Quirky, funny, and clever, but quite stereotypical in retrospect.
macintux 6y ago
I've been trying for years to remember details about a game I very briefly played online in 1989; with luck, perhaps this series will cover it. Looking forward to reading this.
nickt 6y ago
Happy to see “You are in a comfortable tunnel like hall” is in there! Looks like a great series.
ddingus 6y ago
Subscribed. I love these kinds of games and it looks like you will cover games I have not seen before. Great.
hawktheslayer 6y ago
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy text game was my favorite of the genre, and was my first introduction to PC games. I remember it being quite challenging especially in the pre-walkthrough days.
- rchase 6y ago
  Quite challenging. That game is impossible to solve without spoilers, so far as I'm concerned. And lord knows I tried. As far as Infocom goes, the only ones I managed to solve unassisted were Zork I and II and Planetfall, all of which are considered on the easy end of the spectrum. The later games were much more complex. Along with HHG2TG, Lurking Horror was really difficult too. Tons of fun all of them, though. Gosh I miss my C64.
  - SoSoRoCoCo 6y ago
    H2G2 was medium difficulty compared to Starcross and Deadline, it just required patience. And MAN was it satisfying to win as a 13 year old. Long before accomplishments were measured in twitch response rather than deductive logic. Spellbreaker, OTOH, was potentially impossible. It had two puzzles early in the game that were solvable by irreversible methods that made the game unwinnable. (One was casting Girgol to stop time allowed you to solve the Ogre puzzle, but you needed that spell at the very end, can't recall the other).
    - Apocryphon 6y ago
      How were you even supposed to get past the initial room in the Vorgon ship without a guide?!?
  - ghaff 6y ago
    I really liked Planetfall and it's one I made it through to the end without too much help (also pre-walkthroughs/pre-Web). Steve Meretzky was the author of both that and Hitchhikers--the latter with Adams of course. I also really liked his A Mind Forever Voyaging but that's probably closest to an interactive novel that Infocom ever did; the puzzle content is fairly light.
  - spc476 6y ago
    Interesting. I found Planetfall moderately difficult, but the Lurking Horror was easy (I almost finished it first time I played it---I think it took me two sessions). A friend of mine played HHG2TG (I never did) and almost gave up on it.
- corysama 6y ago
  I had the game as a kid who had never heard of the books. Played the intro a dozen times before someone told me the only way to even get started in the game was to lay down in front of the oncoming bulldozer three times in a row. Challenging is an understatement :P
SoSoRoCoCo 6y ago
Too bad so few people turned up to play the Interactive Fiction Competition this year. Only about ~50 votes per game were recorded on average. I think people like to reminisce rather than play I.F., or maybe we've all been broken by 3D. The winning game in 2020 was truly whimsical, and the Magpie scored a place in the top-5 again! https://ifcomp.org/ https://ifcomp.org/
- Waterluvian 6y ago
  I find these games super boring alone but so much fun in small groups. I think they need to be designed as a facilitator of a story, ultimately played and told by you and your friends. Kind of like if the story part of D&D was a standalone product where the software is the DM.
  - SoSoRoCoCo 6y ago
    > but so much fun in small groups. In my 40+ years playing IF, I never considered this. What an interesting idea. I did play an email correspondence campaign in the early 90's but that was a ton of work for the DM since he was writing pages and pages of story. But it was a fun in-between.
  - cproctor 6y ago
    In my academic studies using IF to teach CS [1], I've found it can be very powerful to "play" or "tell" stories in person. (These are middle- and high-school students.) Usually, at the end of a class authors will volunteer to share their stories, and then they will ask for a volunteer to be the protagonist while the author reads as the narrator. (This becomes important when the stories are serious and touch on real-life situations where it could be painful to have someone else misread, misinterpret, or make fun of your story.) [1] Proctor, C., & Garcia, A. (2020). Hogg, L., Stockbridge, K., Achieng-Evenson, C., & SooHoo, S. (Eds.). Student voices in the digital hubbub. Pedagogies of With-ness: Students, Teachers, Voice, and Agency. Myers Educational Press. https://chrisproctor.net/media/publications/proctor_2020_pedagogies.pdf https://chrisproctor.net/media/publications/proctor_2020_ped...
  - skybrian 6y ago
nugget 6y ago
I liked this article about Gemstone 3 https://gizmodo.com/i-had-my-first-kiss-in-gemstone-iii-1845229020 https://gizmodo.com/i-had-my-first-kiss-in-gemstone-iii-1845... which shows the powerful and lasting impact that some of these multi-player text games had on the people (particularly kids) who played them. It was previously posted to HN but I can’t find the thread off hand.
- macintux 6y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24644734 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24644734
mark_l_watson 6y ago
Back when my at home “Internet “ was AOL, I wrote a free text adventure game for the Apple II called Land of the Dwarf. Started with a huge piece of paper and drew a well labeled transition diagram and then writing the game was easy. A huge number of people downloaded the game. I hope they enjoyed it.
the_af 6y ago
I took a serious interest in IF once it reached its "modern" stage (which ironically happened more than a decade ago). It started subverting the tired tropes of "you're in this dungeon and have to find the treasure" and playing with the conventions of the genre and even the UI itself. In the spy game Spider and Web, instead of "losing", for most of the game you get a "that's not what happened, please don't lie to me". There was this scifi game, whose name now escapes me, where you're communicating by radio with the survivor of a spaceship, and every parser error gets reported appropriately: "I'm sorry, you're breaking up, can you repeat please?". In Rematch you have only one move, and then you either die or win (but what you can do in this move can be very complex). In Adam Cadre's Photopia the gameplay possibilities aren't that many, but the story is heartwrenching. His 9:05 is hilarious in how it plays with common player expectations. I love IF.
- rrauenza 6y ago
  Lifeline? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifeline_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifeline_(video_game) We played it some. Battle was kinda silly... we seem to recall also that parsing was easier in original Japanese and English was harder to play.
  - the_af 6y ago
    No, the game I was talking about is IF, as in Interactive Fiction, what text adventures are called now. Without giving away the major plot twist of the game I'm thinking of, I can assure it has nothing to do with Lifeline. Edit: found it! It's called Fail-Safe, and if you ever intend to play it, please don't read spoilers. The game is so short, almost a single "scene", that spoilers will really ruin it: https://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=c6x835i6o9zqfc59 https://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=c6x835i6o9zqfc59
- epaga 6y ago
  Spider and Web‘s climax was a complete rush - I was puzzled for quite some time until the solution hit me over the head. So satisfying. Best IF game I‘ve ever played.
gabrieldlima 6y ago
I really liked the purpose of this series. I believe that anyone who is interested in Game Development (like me) in general will take advantage of what's to come.
beamatronic 6y ago
I enjoyed a C64 text adventure called “Miser”. Anyone else remember it?
dmix 6y ago
This sort of series is why I miss RSS (and yes I've tried and failed to re-adopt it). Email subscriptions are never the same, they disappear in gmail or even worse in other email readers :( I'll keep a look out for this one though. Also I'm happy to see it on Substack, seems like a good platform for the future.
- tusharchoudhary 6y ago
  On any Substack, you can add /feed at the end of the URL to get the RSS feed. https://if50.substack.com/feed https://if50.substack.com/feed
  - aasasd 6y ago
    Thanks!
romwell 6y ago
One of my favorite ever games was Sherlock Holmes: The Riddle of Crown Jewels, playable on Archive[1]. As a text adventure, it has offered me freedom I have not seen in any game until, possibly, Fallout 2. Playing as Dr. Watson, I found a gun in Holmes' office. The first thing I tried was, of course, shooting Holmes. And it worked! I was promptly arrested, though, but I could do that. It felt as if I could do anything. Typing commands instead of selecting from a few options made for a liberating experience. [1]https://archive.org/details/msdos_Sherlock_Holmes_-_The_Riddle_of_the_Crown_Jewels_1987 https://archive.org/details/msdos_Sherlock_Holmes_-_The_Ridd...
jostylr 6y ago
For those who enjoy historical and game-play review of text-based games and similar games, there is the digital antiquarian: https://www.filfre.net/ https://www.filfre.net/ If you go to the ebooks page, you can get (free) ebooks of game coverage from years spanning from 1966 to 1993. I believe every infocom text game is covered.

152 points by homarp 6y ago

I spent many hours creating games using the Graphic Adventure Creator. Despite it's name it was really just text adventures but with the occasional slowly-drawn static scene. Also a big fan of Level 9 and Infocom, though the only one of theirs I ever completed was the Leather Goddesses of Phobos. Quirky, funny, and clever, but quite stereotypical in retrospect.

macintux 6y ago

I've been trying for years to remember details about a game I very briefly played online in 1989; with luck, perhaps this series will cover it. Looking forward to reading this.

nickt 6y ago

Happy to see “You are in a comfortable tunnel like hall” is in there! Looks like a great series.

ddingus 6y ago

Subscribed. I love these kinds of games and it looks like you will cover games I have not seen before. Great.

hawktheslayer 6y ago

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy text game was my favorite of the genre, and was my first introduction to PC games. I remember it being quite challenging especially in the pre-walkthrough days.

rchase 6y ago
Quite challenging. That game is impossible to solve without spoilers, so far as I'm concerned. And lord knows I tried. As far as Infocom goes, the only ones I managed to solve unassisted were Zork I and II and Planetfall, all of which are considered on the easy end of the spectrum. The later games were much more complex. Along with HHG2TG, Lurking Horror was really difficult too. Tons of fun all of them, though. Gosh I miss my C64.
- SoSoRoCoCo 6y ago
  H2G2 was medium difficulty compared to Starcross and Deadline, it just required patience. And MAN was it satisfying to win as a 13 year old. Long before accomplishments were measured in twitch response rather than deductive logic. Spellbreaker, OTOH, was potentially impossible. It had two puzzles early in the game that were solvable by irreversible methods that made the game unwinnable. (One was casting Girgol to stop time allowed you to solve the Ogre puzzle, but you needed that spell at the very end, can't recall the other).
  - Apocryphon 6y ago
    How were you even supposed to get past the initial room in the Vorgon ship without a guide?!?
- ghaff 6y ago
  I really liked Planetfall and it's one I made it through to the end without too much help (also pre-walkthroughs/pre-Web). Steve Meretzky was the author of both that and Hitchhikers--the latter with Adams of course. I also really liked his A Mind Forever Voyaging but that's probably closest to an interactive novel that Infocom ever did; the puzzle content is fairly light.
- spc476 6y ago
  Interesting. I found Planetfall moderately difficult, but the Lurking Horror was easy (I almost finished it first time I played it---I think it took me two sessions). A friend of mine played HHG2TG (I never did) and almost gave up on it.
corysama 6y ago
I had the game as a kid who had never heard of the books. Played the intro a dozen times before someone told me the only way to even get started in the game was to lay down in front of the oncoming bulldozer three times in a row. Challenging is an understatement :P

SoSoRoCoCo 6y ago

Too bad so few people turned up to play the Interactive Fiction Competition this year. Only about ~50 votes per game were recorded on average. I think people like to reminisce rather than play I.F., or maybe we've all been broken by 3D. The winning game in 2020 was truly whimsical, and the Magpie scored a place in the top-5 again! https://ifcomp.org/ https://ifcomp.org/

Waterluvian 6y ago
I find these games super boring alone but so much fun in small groups. I think they need to be designed as a facilitator of a story, ultimately played and told by you and your friends. Kind of like if the story part of D&D was a standalone product where the software is the DM.
- SoSoRoCoCo 6y ago
  > but so much fun in small groups. In my 40+ years playing IF, I never considered this. What an interesting idea. I did play an email correspondence campaign in the early 90's but that was a ton of work for the DM since he was writing pages and pages of story. But it was a fun in-between.
- cproctor 6y ago
  In my academic studies using IF to teach CS [1], I've found it can be very powerful to "play" or "tell" stories in person. (These are middle- and high-school students.) Usually, at the end of a class authors will volunteer to share their stories, and then they will ask for a volunteer to be the protagonist while the author reads as the narrator. (This becomes important when the stories are serious and touch on real-life situations where it could be painful to have someone else misread, misinterpret, or make fun of your story.) [1] Proctor, C., & Garcia, A. (2020). Hogg, L., Stockbridge, K., Achieng-Evenson, C., & SooHoo, S. (Eds.). Student voices in the digital hubbub. Pedagogies of With-ness: Students, Teachers, Voice, and Agency. Myers Educational Press. https://chrisproctor.net/media/publications/proctor_2020_pedagogies.pdf https://chrisproctor.net/media/publications/proctor_2020_ped...
- skybrian 6y ago

nugget 6y ago

I liked this article about Gemstone 3 https://gizmodo.com/i-had-my-first-kiss-in-gemstone-iii-1845229020 https://gizmodo.com/i-had-my-first-kiss-in-gemstone-iii-1845... which shows the powerful and lasting impact that some of these multi-player text games had on the people (particularly kids) who played them. It was previously posted to HN but I can’t find the thread off hand.

macintux 6y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24644734 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24644734

mark_l_watson 6y ago

Back when my at home “Internet “ was AOL, I wrote a free text adventure game for the Apple II called Land of the Dwarf. Started with a huge piece of paper and drew a well labeled transition diagram and then writing the game was easy. A huge number of people downloaded the game. I hope they enjoyed it.

the_af 6y ago

I took a serious interest in IF once it reached its "modern" stage (which ironically happened more than a decade ago). It started subverting the tired tropes of "you're in this dungeon and have to find the treasure" and playing with the conventions of the genre and even the UI itself. In the spy game Spider and Web, instead of "losing", for most of the game you get a "that's not what happened, please don't lie to me". There was this scifi game, whose name now escapes me, where you're communicating by radio with the survivor of a spaceship, and every parser error gets reported appropriately: "I'm sorry, you're breaking up, can you repeat please?". In Rematch you have only one move, and then you either die or win (but what you can do in this move can be very complex). In Adam Cadre's Photopia the gameplay possibilities aren't that many, but the story is heartwrenching. His 9:05 is hilarious in how it plays with common player expectations. I love IF.

rrauenza 6y ago
Lifeline? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifeline_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifeline_(video_game) We played it some. Battle was kinda silly... we seem to recall also that parsing was easier in original Japanese and English was harder to play.
- the_af 6y ago
  No, the game I was talking about is IF, as in Interactive Fiction, what text adventures are called now. Without giving away the major plot twist of the game I'm thinking of, I can assure it has nothing to do with Lifeline. Edit: found it! It's called Fail-Safe, and if you ever intend to play it, please don't read spoilers. The game is so short, almost a single "scene", that spoilers will really ruin it: https://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=c6x835i6o9zqfc59 https://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=c6x835i6o9zqfc59
epaga 6y ago
Spider and Web‘s climax was a complete rush - I was puzzled for quite some time until the solution hit me over the head. So satisfying. Best IF game I‘ve ever played.

gabrieldlima 6y ago

I really liked the purpose of this series. I believe that anyone who is interested in Game Development (like me) in general will take advantage of what's to come.

beamatronic 6y ago

I enjoyed a C64 text adventure called “Miser”. Anyone else remember it?

dmix 6y ago

This sort of series is why I miss RSS (and yes I've tried and failed to re-adopt it). Email subscriptions are never the same, they disappear in gmail or even worse in other email readers :( I'll keep a look out for this one though. Also I'm happy to see it on Substack, seems like a good platform for the future.

tusharchoudhary 6y ago
On any Substack, you can add /feed at the end of the URL to get the RSS feed. https://if50.substack.com/feed https://if50.substack.com/feed
- aasasd 6y ago
  Thanks!

romwell 6y ago

One of my favorite ever games was Sherlock Holmes: The Riddle of Crown Jewels, playable on Archive[1]. As a text adventure, it has offered me freedom I have not seen in any game until, possibly, Fallout 2. Playing as Dr. Watson, I found a gun in Holmes' office. The first thing I tried was, of course, shooting Holmes. And it worked! I was promptly arrested, though, but I could do that. It felt as if I could do anything. Typing commands instead of selecting from a few options made for a liberating experience. [1]https://archive.org/details/msdos_Sherlock_Holmes_-_The_Riddle_of_the_Crown_Jewels_1987 https://archive.org/details/msdos_Sherlock_Holmes_-_The_Ridd...

jostylr 6y ago

For those who enjoy historical and game-play review of text-based games and similar games, there is the digital antiquarian: https://www.filfre.net/ https://www.filfre.net/ If you go to the ebooks page, you can get (free) ebooks of game coverage from years spanning from 1966 to 1993. I believe every infocom text game is covered.