Tech: A Text-Based Adventure Retrospective

Nowadays they're called "interactive fiction," but text-based adventures are some of the oldest computer games around. Back before polygons and sophisticated Dolby 5.1 sound, and even before VGA graphics and stereo sound, these games allowed players to explore entire virtual worlds created by talented game designers - all without showing a single visual or auditory cue except for the stark lines of text flowing across the screen. This post is sort of my tip of the hat to anyone who's ever stared at a command line, imagining where to go next.

The most iconic of these adventures, and one of the first, is Zork. It begins evocatively:

From this starting point, you can explore an underground empire, its rich history, and its famous denizens (the grue, in particular, is one of the best examples of mounting tension and area denial ever conceived). Simple commands like "Get book" and "Drink potion" allow all sorts of possibilites, including complicated puzzles.

Further games would become even more elaborate. While the commercial era of interactive fiction ended many decades ago, people are still making stories within the genre, some of them rivaling printed novels in terms of plot depth and complexity. The (sorta) famous XYZZY Awards commemorate the best of these new IF authors. While there's always a need for innovative play mechanics, a good story will always save mediocre gameplay, and not the other way around.

I suppose the latest evolution in the text-based game is the MUD. Analogous to modern MMORPGs but with far less graphical overhead, MUDs allow many users at a time to communicate and adventure in a common environment. Though SecondLife and other "virtual worlds" get more press, the MUD is, at its core, the same idea. I sort of view the Internet itself as a twisting maze of text-based challenges.

Actually, the first computer program I ever wrote was a text adventure (more like a "choose your own adventure" book, actually, in that you were limited in your choices). It was a simple little affair in line-numbered BASIC that took you through haunted woods and across rickety bridges. I miss it terribly - never should have deleted it.