As you might expect, text-based computer games are games that use a text-based user interface rather than a graphical one.
Most text-based computer games are text adventure games, which are closely related to interactive fiction. Early adventure games, from the 1970s and 1980s, were text-based and used text parsers to translate the player's input into commands. Similar text-based adventure games are still made, and continue to be popular among a growing segment of the gaming community.
Many of these early text adventure games were in the form of a textual maze, where the objective was to find your way out of a building, a cave, or some other place that is described for you, room by room, as the player manages to escape from one room using clues that were found by examining objects in the room.
The first adventure game was Colossal Cave Adventure, often known simply as Adventure, which was developed in the mid-1970s for the PDP-10 mainframe computer. In the game, players controlled a character through simple text commands, exploring a cave that was said to be filled with wealth. Players earned points by acquiring treasure and for escaping the cave alive, the goal being to score the maximum number of points.
Upgraded versions of the adventure maze game used static images as well as text, and some of them listed choices that a player could make.
Introduced by Jared Sorensen, parsely games are an adaptation of the text adventure game, in which a person replaces the computer and a map and outline of the adventure to be played replaces the software.
Interactive fiction stemmed from these text-based adventure games, and might fall within the genre of an adventure game when the focus is on solving a puzzle. The terms are frequently viewed as synonymous but, when the user/reader is focused on solving a puzzle, it's a text adventure, and when the focus is on the story, it's interactive fiction.
Solving puzzles is an important part of most adventure games. These may take the form of decoding messages, finding and using items, opening locked doors, and discovering and exploring new locations. Generally, solving a puzzle will permit access to a new area of the game, while revealing more of the storyline.
Inventory management is often a significant part of an adventure game. Since players are able to pick up some objects in the game, the player knows that objects that can be picked up are likely to serve a purpose within the game. In a text-based adventure, spaces, objects, and characters are described, and the player interacts with this environment by inputting simple action words and included objects, such as "take the ball," "open the box," or "put the ball in the box."
Graphical text adventures often utilize a point-and-click device, often prompting players to engage in a systematic search for areas on the screen that can be interacted with rather than using the clues provided. Other graphical adventure games might highlight the items that can be interacted with.
The idea behind gathering and using items in a player's inventory is to encourage players to apply thinking techniques, even real-world experiences and knowledge about objects, such as placing a deflated inner tube onto a forked piece of wood to create a slingshot which could be used to break a window. In many of these games, items found in one room may not prove useful until the player is in another room later in the game, so players may have to remember which items they are carrying.
Adventure games may be placed in any setting, such as a medieval dungeon, a fantasy world, another planet, or a contemporary jail. Comedy is a common theme, often used to return comedic responses when players attempt actions that are ridiculous, impossible, or not scripted into the gameplay.
Adventure games involve storylines that include significant dialogue, either text-based or using recorded dialogue. Players can engage non-player characters by choosing a line of pre-written dialogue from a menu, triggering a response from the game character. Speaking to game characters can reveal clues or elicit other responses from the character that can be useful in completing the quest.
While early adventure games often recorded high scores or assigned player ranks, achieving a high score was generally a secondary goal. Contemporary adventure games often have no ranking system.
Some adventure games included the possibility of player death, but most do not, and some early adventure games trapped players in unwinnable situations without ending the game.
Although text adventures were in their prime in the 1980s, largely replaced by video graphic games, they never went away. New ones come out every year, and they seem to be making a resurgence in recent years.
Most MUDs are text-based but, because the emphasis in a MUD is on roleplaying, we have opted to list MUDs separately.
Categories
@MUD Games |
Recommended Resources
The game site specializes in text-based, multiple-choice games, produced in-house. The company has also developed a scripting language for writing text-based games, known as ChoiceScripts, which is made available for others. Apart from its own games, Choice of Games also hosts games produced by other designers using ChoiceScript. Some of its games are free to play online, while others may be downloaded from the Apple App Store, Google Play Store, or Amazon App Store.
https://www.choiceofgames.com/
Code 7 is a next-generation text adventure that combines a fully-voiced audio narrative with immersive hacking gameplay. As the gameplay begins, the player is in the role of the hacker Alex, who is trapped on an eerie space station with nothing but a computer. Players gather information, navigate, and hack their way through a four-chapter episodic adventure. The game plays on Windows, Mac, or Linux platforms. A video trailer and a press kit are available online.
http://www.code7-game.com/
Get Lamp is a documentary about adventures in text. With limited sounds, simple graphics, and minimal computing power, the first computer games were text adventure games. With a heyday in the 1980s, these games usually involved the solving of puzzles and the art of writing, describing virtual worlds using text rather than graphics, then inviting them in the share the worlds that were created. This site is a documentary of the creation of these games, including interviews with game authors.
http://www.getlamp.com/
Presented in the style of a 1980s era adventure game, iFiction includes links to 265 text adventure games in forty-eight categories, with a separate section for those released by Infocom, which produced several works of interactive fiction from 1979 to 1989, and another page of non-standard IF games. Links to other topics related to text adventures and interactive fiction, some in languages other than English, are included. Other topics include awards and competitions.
https://www.ifiction.org/
Written by the author of an interactive fiction game known as 1893: A World’s Fair Mystery, the site discusses the nature of interactive fiction, including ideas as to how to go about writing interactive fiction, as to the creative and imaginative rather than to the technical aspects of creating IF. Screenshots of the game are provided, along with a download link to 1893, as well as some other interactive fiction created by the same author. Various books and authors are also reviewed.
http://www.illuminatedlantern.com/
Created by Jared Sorensen, parsley games are an adaptation of the text adventure game, requiring two or more people, in which one person replaces the computer, and a map and outline of the adventure to be played replaces the software. Free and commercial parsley games may be downloaded or purchased, and then downloaded from the site. Screenshots and synopses of the games are available, with instructions and basic rules, and links to a profile of the author are included.
https://jaredsorensen.itch.io/
Magium is a text adventure game in which the player assumes the role of an ordinary guy trying to win a mage tournament against the most powerful mages in the world. Along the way, the player becomes acquainted with the other inhabitants of the continent, as well as the backstory. The first ten chapters can be played online for free but, in order to play all of the content that is currently available, the app will need to be downloaded either from Google Play or from the Apple App Store.
http://magium-game.com/
Magnus’ Interactive Fiction Page
Created by Magnus Olsson, the site briefly describes and discusses the interactive fiction genre of computer games, and offers five of his own IF games as free downloads, all but one of them including the source code. Available games are entitled, The Dungeon of Dunjin, Uncle Zebulon’s Will, Aayela, Zugzwang, and Hunt the Wumpus, a modified port of a classic text adventure game from 1972. Links to a few reviews of other interactive fiction games are included.
https://dflund.se/~mol/if.html
Founded by Jared A. Sorensen in 1997 to publish tabletop RPGs, the site also features Parsely games, the first of which were created by Sorensen in 2003. Action Castle, the first Parsely game, is available, along with a collection of other party games inspired by the 1980s text adventure games. A description of the genre of the game is included, and published books, PDFs, and demos are also available. The hardcover edition includes a complimentary PDF version. Contacts and credits are included.
http://www.memento-mori.com/
Pac-Txt is an online text adventure game based on Pac-Man. At the start, the player awakens in a large complex, slightly disoriented. Glowing dots can be seen hovering mouth-level nearby in every direction. Off in the distance can be heard the faint howling of what can only be some sort of a ghost or several ghosts. Room descriptions are in an upper field, while the player enters text in the field below. After each move, entering “look around” will give you your current status.
http://www.pactxt.com/
Text adventure games began with a game called Adventure, which later became known as Colossal Cave, the next milestone in the genre being Zork, which was released in the late 1970s. The site links to historical resources and other sites whose topics are focused on text adventures, as well as to sites for authoring systems and others of interest to those who want to learn to write text adventures, and to several downloadable classic games and related topics.
http://pdd.if-legends.org/
SAGA is the official site for Scott Adams, the first person to create an adventure-style game for personal computers, written in the BASIC programming language on a TRS-80 Model I computer. Although Colossal Cave had been written two years earlier, it was written on a PDP-10 mainframe computer. His site includes historical information, as well as adventure games, the most recent released for the Windows platform in 2000, and information about current projects.
http://www.msadams.com/
Developed by Team Advent of Sleepy Owl Software, Text Quest is a first-person, text-based adventure game for the PC and Mac, involving a virtual world in which every object is made of words. Players may travel from dark forests to colossal caves, solving puzzles and taking part in a literal text quest. The game is an update of the 1980s text adventure genre. Demos, consisting of the first two levels of the game, for the Mac and for the Windows operating systems may be downloaded.
http://www.textquestgame.com/
The modern text adventure game includes a simulated hand-drawn map that keeps track of all previously explored areas in the game, and commands may be given by pressing buttons, or they may be typed in as was the case in early text adventures. The Christian-themed story begins with the player having been involved in an accident, and unable to remember who or where he is. Currently, only chapter one is free, with chapter two available through mobile outlets.
https://www.theforgottennightmare.com/
The Interactive Fiction Archive
A service of the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation, the mission of the Archive is to preserve the history and practice of interactive fiction and to make it freely available to the public. Established in 1992, the Archive has collected thousands of text adventures, text adventure development tools, articles, essays, hint files, walkthroughs, jokes, and other resources related to interactive fiction. The Archive also preserves the history of other IF institutions.
http://www.ifarchive.org/
Specializing in text adventure and puzzle games, Robin Johnson offers keyboardless text adventure games, classic text adventures, and 2D graphical puzzle games available to play online, or to download. Although contributions are accepted, there is no charge for the games, which include science fiction, mythology, mystery, and strategy adventures. A brief instruction on how to play a text adventure game is included. Brief descriptions of each game are included.
http://www.versificator.net/
