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Remembering Text Adventure Games
"West of House You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.
There is a small mailbox here."
And so the game Zork: The Great Underground Empire, created by Infocom in 1980, begins. Back in the days of monstrous computers and monochrome monitors, a gamer could still have a rich experience playing thoughtful and challenging games. This genre was called interactive fiction, and the games were commonly referred to as text adventures. 3D graphics and surround sound were not required, and when you traveled into a dark tunnel without a torch, the system would tell you, "It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.", you were genuinely frightened. I love a game that makes me think, as opposed to, say, some console games that were available that required dexterous controller maneuvers to get your sprite to do what you wanted, and winning was just a matter of getting from the left side of the world to the right.
While Infocom's Zork was not the first text adventure (that distinction belongs to Adventure, created by Will Crowther in the mid 1970s and later expanded by Don Woods), it certainly was the most prolific, spawning at least a dozen sequels and spin-offs, with the later games including graphics. The earliest text adventures were developed for mainframe systems, and were therefore only used by people with access to those sorts of systems, such as programmers and system administrators. Infocom developed the "Z-machine" system, which allowed the games to be ported to all of the common home computer models, such as the Apple II and Commodore 64. The games were then marketed and sold to the masses with tremendous appeal.
I personally jumped onto the text adventure bandwagon late, somewhere around 1992. By that time, Infocom had released two compilations of its successful text adventure games, which included not only the Zork series, but also other games, including The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (what I wouldn't give for a "thing your aunt gave you")based on the original book by Douglas Adams, and the Planetfall series. However, I didn't enjoy these games any less than the programmers who first played text adventures on ARPAnet in the 1970s. I still have my notebook where I carefully recorded each move through the virtual world to create a map laid out in a grid. The challenges and puzzles in these games were genuinely thought provoking.
Unfortunately, the early 1990s saw the downfall of the interactive fiction genre and the text adventure as the graphics for computer games improved. Interactive fiction did have a bit of extra life through the advent of multi-user dungeons, or MUDs. MUDs were text adventures that people could access by connecting to bulletin board services (BBSs), or through an Internet terminal. These games were sort of a precursor to the multi-player role-playing games of today. Not only could you interact with the world in the same way as in the standard text adventure, but you could also interact with other players. Since the MUD users were generally the same people who played role-playing games, the majority of the available MUDs had a fantasy or science-fiction setting.
While the classic text adventure games are not flashy, they do provide a great diversion when you want to challenge your brain, or waste some time. A pencil and some graph paper are useful to have on hand so you can create maps of where you've been in the world. And lucky you, many of the early Zork games are available for you online. So take a break from your World of Warcraft exploits, or your Halo fragfests and check out a classic game from back in the day when games were created by geeks, for geeks. The original mainframe version can be downloaded here:
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