Retrospective: Text Adventures

By Martyn Carroll Published 10 July, 2011

Interactive Friction.

I admit it. I used to type swear words into text adventure games.

A lot of the time I wanted to see what replies the author has reserved for potty-mouthed players. It would usually be something like "How rude!" or "Wash your mouth out!" One exception was a game called Quest for the Golden Eggcup where swearing would see you thrown into "God's dungeon" from which you had to escape.

But sometimes I just couldn't help swearing. These games would drive me so mad that I'd find myself hammering out rude words without thinking. It was text adventure Tourette's and it would usually be triggered by a situation like this:

  • You are on a mountain path. You can got north, south, or east. What now?
  • > EAST

  • You fall into a chasm. You are dead. Play again (Y/N)?
  • > ARSE GRAPES

That's a particularly nasty example, though not uncommon. In text adventures, instant death was seemingly around every corner, but usually you were at least given an opportunity to save yourself. And when I say opportunity, I mean one fleeting chance to guess the correct verb-noun combination:

  • You see an angry Orc. What now?
  • KILL ORC

  • You can't. The Orc attacks you. You are dead. Play again (Y/N)?
  • > F*** OFF
zork

Infocom's original Zork adventure was included as an easter egg in Black Ops. A bit random, that.

Hopefully you'd saved your position beforehand so you could load it back up and try to kill the Orc in a variety of ways - no doubt to discover later that it only succumbed to the jewel-encrusted dagger which you received from the local blacksmith in exchange for six magic beans and a ladle.

But even when you had as many turns as required to solve a problem, you could still spend hours searching for the exact right words to enter. Take After Shock, for example, a game from Interceptor Software set in an earthquake-ravaged city. One of the early puzzles involved draining away water by opening a sluice gate in a sewer. Having attached a handle to the gate, you were told that you couldn't turn it because the gate was rusty. No problem - you were carrying a plastic bottle filled with oil.

So let's do this. "OIL GATE". You can't do that. "OIL HANDLE". Please be more specific. "GREASE GATE". I don't understand. "POUR OIL ONTO GATE". Don't be silly.

hulk

Bite lip? BITE LIP?? HULK SMASH!!

The correct words? "LUBRICATE MECHANISM". Duh.

Some solutions required a thesaurus. Others were just plain stupid, like in the old Artic adventure Espionage Island where you had to turn off some lights; there was a handy switch, but "PRESS SWITCH" or "PUSH SWITCH" wouldn't work. Naturally you needed to "SWITCH SWITCH".

Probably the most infamous example of this was found in Adventure International's The Hulk. The game began with you as Bruce Banner, alone and tied to a chair. It was pretty obvious that in order to escape you needed to become Hulk, but how were you supposed to get angry enough to transform? "BITE LIP" of course!

Thankfully the game hinted at the answer in the manual, otherwise I'd still be stuck in that chair right now. I never got much further though. The Hulk had me beat.

With no online FAQs to read or helplines to phone, it was pretty much down to you to figure it all out. If you were horribly stuck in a certain game there was always a chance that one of the magazines like C&VG or Crash might print the solution. Sometimes they'd even share the name and address of an obliging reader who had completed the game so you could mail them for help.

I regularly called on the services of these big-hearted adventurers. I'd post off my questions and then endure an agonising wait for my self-addressed envelope to return. I sometimes even included sweets with my questions in the hope that the bribe would hasten the reply.

The thing was, whether you managed to work it out yourself or had a little help, there was no better feeling that breaking through those brick walls. You'd enter the solution and rather than the usual replies of "I don't understand" or "I can't do that", fresh new text would flood onto the screen and the game would joyously open up. Another brick wall would be just around the corner - a stinking bog or giant spider, probably - but those brief, punch-the-air moments made it all worthwhile.

hobbit

Useless Thorin, sitting down and singing about gold. Again.

The more I played text adventures, the more I enjoyed them. I began to understand the mechanics behind the puzzles and recognise all of the usual clichés. If there was an old gnarled tree you climbed it. If there was suspicious-looking sand on the floor you dug it. If you found a dead person you searched their pockets. If an NPC walked off you'd follow them. If you entered a church you'd pray. If you found yourself in one of those dreaded mazes with "exits in all directions", you made a bloody map.

Sometimes examining an object wasn't sufficient - you need to examine it 'carefully'. Sometimes the only way to move forward was to actually 'wait'.

It also helped that the games themselves became more professional, with the output of British companies like Level 9, Delta 4 and Magnetic Scrolls coming to rival that of US giant Infocom. Parsers were updated to understand a wider range of commands and the overall presentation was greatly improved. New features like 'ramsave', which let you instantly store your progress in memory, removed the hassle of loading saves from tape or disk.

gremlin

One of the better Adventure International games was based on the Gremlins movie.

But despite all of the fantastic commercial releases, one of the best things about text adventures is that anyone could write one. You could use one of the authoring packages like The Quill or The Graphic Adventure Creator, or even stick something together in the version of Basic that came with your computer.

You didn't need to understand sprite routines or machine code. Just an active imagination and a competent command of the English language would do.

I dabbled and finished a few of my own adventures. One was a parody of The Omen called Oh Man! in which you had to avoid all manner of overblown death scenarios. I remember it being childish and pretty terrible, but for the sake of the poor people who actually played it, I made sure of one thing - there was a suitably heartfelt response to each and every swear word.

Picture of Martyn.

About Martyn Carroll

Martyn has been writing about video games since 1997. He launched Retro Gamer magazine in 2004 and has been typecast as a lover of rubbish old games ever since. His specialist subject is actually the Crabs novel of Guy N. Smith.

Read more articles from Martyn by visiting the Martyn Carroll archive page.

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Comments (74) Latest comment 10 months ago

Comments for this article are now closed, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • JayScott #1 11 months ago

    The Secret of Bastow Manor on the C64 consumed many many hours of my childhood. It used the keystroke graphics to make pictures which were pretty terrible but I loved it.

  • TedMoseby #2 11 months ago

    Text adventures are what introduced me to gaming. Specifically, Sphinx Adventure for the Acorn Electron. After that, there was no stopping me: Twin Kingdon Valley, Countdown to Doom, The Wheel of Fortune, the Rick Hanson triliogy, and so many more.

  • BlueMaxima #3 11 months ago

    [link url=http://adrift.co
    ]http://adrift.co
    [/link]

    Adrift is a text adventure development environment. There are other alternatives (Inform, TADS, Quest) but I honestly prefer this one.

  • TriggerHippie #4 11 months ago

    I think my first text adventure was Urban Upstart on the Speccy. If you got frustrated and started entering swear words you were carried off to jail!

    I distinctly remember breaking into the code of Twin Valley Kingdom on the BBC micro and rewriting the text so that it was as stupid and obscene as my 12 year old mind could make it. Then laughing myself to tears while my friends tried to play it. Modern games could use a bit of that I think :p
    Edited by TriggerHippie at 10/07/11 @ 07:52

  • nobloodyname #5 11 months ago

    What an enjoyable article.

    I acquired my first computer - a rubber keyed Spectrum 48 - on Christmas Day in 1984 so I remember text adventures well. Urban Upstart transported you with a foreboding sense of doom to almost any inner city estate of the 80s while Sherlock conjured a wonderful impression of London in the 19th century. Who didn't enjoy hailing a hansom cab ("hail cab";) to Leatherhead?

    I, too, made my own adventure in The Quill although I wasn't capable enough to use its counterpart, The Illustrator. But the adventure worked, nonetheless, and it was the first text adventure I successfully completed. Gold star for me.

    On a final note, the graphics in the latter day of text adventures became amazing for the time. Anyone remember first seeing screenshots for Magnetic Scrolls' The Pawn? Breathtaking.

    Thank you for the trip down memory lane.

  • MarketZero #6 11 months ago

    Twin Kingdom Valley was great. Another game with real charm was Eureka. Also Kentilla, with puzzles based around your magic sword which you could leave anywhere then magically retrieve by typing Kentilla.
    Edited by MarketZero at 10/07/11 @ 08:03

  • Alestes #7 11 months ago

    I remember my first text adventure, which was V on the C64 and based on the TV-series with the same name. I don't think it was an official game though, but just something that some V fan put together and then my father somehow got it.

    I also remember playing the official V game later on the C64 too, but that wasn't a text adventure.
    http://www.mobygames.com/game/v
    Edited by Alestes at 13/07/11 @ 14:02

  • DreadedWalrus #8 11 months ago

    One of my first ever games was Wishbringer on the Atari ST when I was three years old. I seem to remember the postmaster in that game teaching me some wonderful insults which amused me for years to come. The ones I remember are knucklehead, chowderbrain, and numbskull. "Inventory" and "examine" became my favourite words.

    I never had any other text adventures (although in the last few years I've started playing "interactive fiction", as it's now called), and yet because of that one game it feels like they played a huge part in my early childhood. I know I would have taken a lot longer to learn how to read, and spell, and so on if it wasn't for text adventures. And they say that games are no good for kids.
    Edited by DreadedWalrus at 10/07/11 @ 08:15

  • Tyronne #9 11 months ago

    Spent many hours playing text adventures (and the early icon controlled adventures like `zzzzzzzz` too) some of my favs include `subsunk``seabase delta``hampstead` and so many others.
    The quill and the illustrator software packages enabled so many people to create their own (be them good or bad) and as much as I was never able to create anything worthwhile with them , they were the mod tools of their day.

  • barchetta #10 11 months ago

    I remember being eager to see if a new location in Twin Kingdom Valley held an 'animation' - in reality often just a single sprite moving across the screen :)

    I too struggled with The Hulk. I seem to remember ants and a use of wax cropped up. Most likely that was as far as I got before giving up. 10 Little Indians, Sherlock, Invincible Island.... Ah. We had a small group within the scoop computer club that would share adventuring tips and it would sometimes get quite competitive in racing through a game.

    I carried on into the 16bit era (ST) with Mindshadow, Tass Times in Tone Town and others using various WIMP controls, but retained my love for simple textual pleasures such as The Lurking Horror and Leather Goddesses of Phobos

  • AOFanboi #11 11 months ago

    Inform is great. Here's a code example for defining crushing and slashing weapons in a game:

    A weapon is a kind of thing. it can be blunt or sharp.
    Crushing is an action applying to one visible thing. Understand "crush [something]" as crushing.
    Slashing is an action applying to one visible thing. Understand "slash [something]" and "cut [something]" as slashing.
    Check crushing: if a blunt weapon is not carried by the player, say "Curses! No blunt weapon!" instead.
    Check slashing: if a sharp weapon is not carried by the player, say "Curses! No sharp weapon!" instead.
    Report crushing: say "*SLAM* You squish [the noun]!"
    Report slashing: say "*SLASH* You eviscerate [the noun]!"
    Report crushing or slashing: now all remains carried by the noun is in the location; remove the noun from play.


    See? All programming languages should be that readable.

  • RedPanda #12 11 months ago

    Post deleted at 14:31:59 28-01-2012

  • riceNpea #13 11 months ago

    i had The Hobbit on the old rubber keyed Speccy and i never got passed the phrase, ' YOU SEE A ROUND WOODEN DOOR '. text adventures were dull as hell.

    when i bought my Spectrum 48k my first ever game was Flight Simulator which was quickly shelved for Jet Pac and my love affair with gaming began.

    seems a lifetime ago. scary how time passes so quickly.

  • StevieP #14 11 months ago

    The first game I ever owned was a text adventure called Space Odyssey. It came on cartridge bundled with the Commodore Plus 4, and I found it impossible. You left a landing pod on a moon with limited oxygen that reduced with every action you made. A couple of years ago I actually found a solution online that detailed a transportation device you are supposed to activate and beam to another planet! I only wish I had kept the computer to try that walkthrough out!

  • muttler #15 11 months ago

    Typing swear words into text adventures, right up there with looking up swear words in dictionarys! Happy days. Nice article.

  • carldjcross #16 11 months ago

    The solution to the first Hulk puzzle was in the manual? What were we playground pirates supposed to do f'cryingoutloud!

    My favourite obtuse answer was in AI's Spiderman game. Trapped in a broken air vent which was steadily filling with gas what was Spidy supposed to do? >HYPERVENTILTE of course.

    I got that one from Derek Brewster's column in Crash or I'd still be stuck there now. As opposed to being stuck in the very next room. Which I am.

  • StooMonster #17 11 months ago

    I spoke to Scott Adams back at the turn of the millennium, after tracking him down as he'd long left the games industry; he was a prolific adventure writer in the 1980s and had created the Marvel licensed games (e.g. like The Hulk in the screenshot above). At the time I was trying to put together a business that reissued text adventures using a combination of WAP and SMS at the time. He was nice and polite but had already sold the rights before I got to talk to him, can't remember who to but they didn't make much of them. Still, turns out there wasn't much demand for gaming on phones back then, with the exception of Snake.

  • StooMonster #18 11 months ago

    I was a big fan of Infocom in the 1980s, and remember Leather Goddes of Phobos and The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy has items in the box you needed to solved the adventure as an early DRM system. e.g. Scratch box five on the card and type in the smel, is thatl "pizza" you wonder?

    Later liked Magnetic Scrolls games, although wonder if some of that was down to their "wow" graphics as well as textual challenges.

  • Floppy #19 11 months ago

    Castle of Riddles on the BBC Micro was my nemesis; armed with a pad of graph paper for map creation.

    'The bear shambles into you. You are dead.'

    With a lack of mobile BBC Micro emulators, I wish I could get it converted to Z-code format; so that I can play it on Twisty, a rather good Android text adventure app.

  • O11Y #20 11 months ago

    At primary school we once got the opportunity of playing an "education" text adventure on an Acorn computer. I can't for the life of me remember what it was called but I remember that it was of one the many turning points that marked my slide into games addiction

  • MiY4MOTO #21 11 months ago

    I played many text adventures on the Speccy. It all started with The Hobbit of course... If Thorin doesn't sit down and sing about gold in Peter Jackson's big screen adaption at least once I'll be disappointed.

    There were loads back in the early days, Planet of Death, Inca Curse, Ship of Doom, Espionage Island were ones I remember playing. There was That's The Spirit, which was by The Edge (of Tim Langdell fame) which actually faked a reset if you repeatedly typed in swear words. Not that I'd do that. Honest!

    I remember a particularly great one, Robin of Sherwood I think it was called, or there was a really imaginative one, which I actually finished, Hampstead which I remember it having a bizarre rant about a "Lathe Bracket" (Why do I remember this stuff?)

    However, I think my all time favourite one was a budget release called Rigel's Revenge which was in two halves, each on one side of a cassette. I remember being stuck for ages at a particular instant death scene at the start of side two for ages.

    Then the Amiga game, with it's tantalising screenshots of the Magnetic Scrolls adventures. Good times.

  • Irien #22 11 months ago

    Funnily enough, I was at a computer exhibition yesterday, and one of the standholders was demoing his text+graphic adventure software, and some games he'd made with it!

    Edit - oh, and the BBC educational adventure was probably "L, a Mathemagical Adventure" or perhaps the "Dust" Trilogy or even Granny's Garden (the latter two had graphics). L was tough but fair, and an *excellent* adventure regardless of its educational pedigree. I think there's a wikipedia entry or other website for it - I was looking into it last year.
    Edited by Irien at 10/07/11 @ 11:00

  • jonsaan #23 11 months ago

    Getting stuck in adventures when you have the correct solution but are inputting it slightly wrong is still an issue to this day. Take a bow Zelda!

  • lucky_jim #24 11 months ago

    You can't talk about text adventures without mentioning Zenobi Software! You just can't!

    Oh, you did. Never mind then. A shame though, as they were a big deal. A lot of one- and two-man outfits got games out to a real audience because of them, and there were some tremendous stories among them (Crack City and Agatha's Folly spring to mind as personal favourites).

  • lesalanos #25 11 months ago

    I've played very few text adventures, but one that I remember well is Eric the Unready (albeit not strictly a text adventure). It was enormous fun, but I never finished it because if you spent too many turns dawdling or getting things wrong, you would run out of time and be caught and executed. Boooo!

  • Bagpuss #26 11 months ago

    Twin Kingdom Valley on the C64.....remember staying up late during school summer holidays to play that and complete it.

    Tried it on a C64 emulator a while back....damn thing had me pulling my hair out in frustration, amazing the patience you have as a youngster...some things should remain in the past, nostalgia is a cruel mistress.

  • TonyCB #27 11 months ago

    Ahh the old vic20 Scott Adams games.... Never finished Dracula !!

  • fiery_jackass #28 11 months ago

    Can't remember which one in particular rewarded prolonged contemplation with a text string, but I saw "time passes... you do nothing..." so often that it entered my soul and became the mocking chant I've lived with ever since.

  • Jim_Lahey #29 11 months ago

    Steviep
    I had space odyssey on the plus 4. Alas I never got very far. Icicle Works was better for a 5 year old.

  • Lunastra78 #30 11 months ago

    I still have fond memories of playing Zork with my dad when I was a kid, and later I would teach myself English (I'm from Norway) by playing King's Quest and Space Quest, years before anyone else in my grade knew the language (we start english classes about 4th grade).

    I also remember the feeling of "betrayal" I felt when King's Quest abandoned the typing and implemented the standard Monkey Island button commands. :-/

  • krakead #31 11 months ago

    There was a Norse-themed game on the speccy, Valhala I think it was. If you swore a little sprite of the censorship busybody Mary Whitehouse would toddle onto the screen and poke your character and then toddle off again. Very surreal...

  • BonzoBanana #32 11 months ago

    I remember playing a game called Rama on the C64. It was based on the Arthur C Clarke book Rendevous with Rama and was really enjoying it but I kept getting stuck and lost patience with it. This has reminded me I must read that book.

  • TheEarlOfZinger #33 11 months ago

    @O11Y


    I remember them well - it could have been:

    Grannys garden
    Geordie racer
    Dinosaur discovery

    They were the ones we had at school anyway. I'm old as fuck, sigh. Well - 30.

  • Rusty_M #34 11 months ago

    I think I only ever had gremlins and one called Federation

  • Bulbatron #35 11 months ago

    Played Granny's Garden back in the day. I also had two other games. Snowball and - er - I think it was called Lords of Time.

    Snowball I was completely hopeless at and didn't have a clue what I was doing. In Lords of Time I got right to the end and then couldn't figure out the last section. There was a door I couldn't open.

    These were all on the old BBCs.
    Edited by Bulbatron at 10/07/11 @ 12:54

  • HokutoNoKen #36 11 months ago

    For anybody that wants to try or get nostalgic, here is an link to try out some of the old Infocom text adventure games.

    Zork I: The Great Underground Empire
    Zork II: The Wizard of Frobozz
    Zork III: The Dungeon Master
    Zork: The Undiscovered Underground
    Enchanter
    Seastalker
    Sorcerer
    Spellbreaker
    Wishbringer
    Starcross
    Suspended
    Planetfall
    The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
    Stationfall
    Deadline
    The Witness
    Leather Goddesses of Phobos
    The Lurking Horror

    NOTICE. Requires Java.

    [link url=http://pot.home.xs4all.nl/infocom/
    ]http://pot.home.xs4all.nl/infocom/
    [/link]

    / Ken

  • ajaxpliskin #37 11 months ago

    Wasn't there a multiplayer text based version of Quake?!

  • tafkap #38 11 months ago

    These text adventures really helped with literacy - there was no room for spelling mistakes! I wonder if the kids of today would be able to get anywhere with them?

    'Pwn Orc with hammr...lolz'

    There were some great satirical releases - 'Bored Of The Rings' and one about Norman Tebbit spring to mind..can't remember it's name..! I still have The Pawn and Guild Of Thieves sitting around somewhere...those graphics seemed incredible when I was fourteen!

  • O11Y #39 11 months ago

    Cheers fellas, may well have been "Granny's Garden", that rings a bell. Good times!

  • kimchibaka #40 11 months ago

    Many thanks for this - great topic for an article, even if it concentrated on games I never came across.

    I've just spent a few minutes playing on Guild of Thieves through Java from here:

    [link url=http://msmemorial.if-legends.org/memorial.php
    ]http://msmemorial.if-legends.org/memoria...[/link]

    The parser seems surprisingly good, still.

    That's the only adventure I paid for I think, the others came bundled with my second-hand Amstrad...I'll never forget rubbing the succulents on my feet to get across the hot coals (unless it's something I dreamed up - hope not, as that memory's followed me for over twenty years!)

    I had The Hobbit, but could never get through the mountains near the start. Brutal stuff. Also the spoof The Boggit, but I couldn't dream up the right combinations of surreal toilet humour-based commands to get anywhere in that one either.

  • overcorpse #41 11 months ago

    Anyone remember The Count on the Vic 20,i spent months on that bastard game.i faintly remember being inside an oven and then getting completely stumped.And to top it off my mother caught me typing swear words ,she wasnt amused.

  • jefranklin18 #42 11 months ago

    My kid sister used to love the old text adventure games on the Dragon 32 (I was quite fond of them as well) to the point where she would make maps of the mazes, etc. In a particularly mean mood one day, I told her I had just got a new for her to try out and let her play on my Dragon which I had written something like:

    10 Input "You are in a cave, paths go to the north, east, south and west. What would you like to do?" as A$
    20 Goto 10

    It took her hours and a fair amount of paper to work out I had pulled a prank. Me encouraging her with "not far now" probably didn't help.

  • jonsaan #43 11 months ago

    No mention of The Hobbit???!!!! By anyone??!??!!

  • Rack #44 11 months ago

    Oh god I'm turning into a real fuddy duddy now. I saw that Inform example of code and I just couldn't get it, how am I supposed to program without arcane instructions like Str_WpnDef = Str_WpnNam & " " & StrCon(Int_WpnDmg)? I don't even know where I'd start.

  • digitalash #45 11 months ago

    Do you still have the Oh Man! code, post it and see if someone can get it running in a modern interpreter.

  • wellzy4eva #46 11 months ago

    I never played Text Adventures when I was a kid, Dizzy was out by then, however Frotz is a great Text Adventure platform, (including the modern ones)

    Anyone with an iPhone, get Frotz for it (it's free) it includes a lot of modern games and the M.I.T. recoding of Zork.

  • Toadguy #47 11 months ago

    Anyone remember Snowball on the Spectrum(Snowball being a big spaceship with cryo tube thing to store people for a long journey).

    There was one bit where you had to get through a cargo hold(or something) without running out of air, a certain number of moves and you were dead. I spent ages trying this and just couldnt do it, then by some fluke I worked out how to get through by going backwards.

    Only text but in my young mind I was on that spaceship.

  • captain-future #48 11 months ago

    my only text adventure I really had contact with was Spellcasting 301 and well that's not a "text" adventure per definition, coz at the time I was more fascinated by the grafix.

    still interesting game concept. ^^

  • linksdad #49 11 months ago

    Snowball was amazing. One of the few games I totally completed without help. The other level 9 games where great to, they were all big games and the interpreter had a nice feel to it.

    Interestingly, for me at least, I met Mike Austin on a professional level a few years back. He was writing commercial email broadcasting software in Southampton.

  • technicianTed #50 11 months ago

    I started playing text adventures on my(gulp)zx81 back in the early 80's.
    Games by artic computing, text adventures called inca curse and ship of doom.

    The hobbit on the spectrum is the one i probably remember with the most nostalgia when looking back.
    Of course i remember all the infocom and level 9 adventure games but i really had a soft spot for 'Jinxter' on the amiga by magnetic scrolls.
    It just had a wacky feel to it.

  • Kaminari #51 11 months ago

    Probably like many other European players, my first exposure to text adventures (the term "interactive fiction" didn't exist back then) was The Pawn. I was 12 years old at the time, and I was just starting to learn English at school. Needless to say, it was an impossible yet fascinating experience.

    Except for Magnetic Scrolls and Infocom, most publishers didn't put much effort into the development of their text parsers. Adventure International, Level 9 and even Sierra were some of the worst offenders in that respect, and it somehow contributed in tarnishing the reputation of the genre. It's also interesting to note that text adventures didn't easily adapt to languages other than English, which explain why the few games available in my language (French) all had terrible text parsers.

    Most people will agree that Magnetic and Infocom produced some of the very best commercial adventures. Yet my favourite publisher was without a doubt Legend Entertainment. They struck a happy medium between a superb text parser and wonderful audiovisual resources. Their MT-32 soundtracks litterally amped up the atmosphere.

  • roughsleeper #52 11 months ago

    I played hundreds of them - Infocom Wishbringer was my fave!
    The one puzzle solution I remember being furious at was:
    'Place plant pot plant in plant pot.'
    I dont remember the game, but I had to wait until CVGA monthly computer magazine in the UK came out for the walkthrough.

  • Killdare #53 11 months ago

    So much time wasted on so many great games, especially from Level 9. Like others, I remember Snowball as a thing of genius (and I seem to remember the loading music was an 8 bit rendition of Winter from Vivaldi's Four Seasons) not to mention the rather great Dungeon Adventure too. And then there were some greats from Bug Byte - Twin Kingdom Valley in particular (it had graphics! So few BBC adventures had graphics!). I still have nightmares about The Hobbit though (especially bloody Thorin) - Bored of the Rings was much more fun.

  • evilboo #54 11 months ago

    Don't dis The Hobbit! How many games of the time gave you a fully modelled physics system, 'real time gameplay' in a text adventure and 'emergent gameplay' with fully independent NPCs?????

    [link url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hobbit_(1982_video_game)
    ]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hobbit_...[/link]

    It was a masterpiece and lightyears away from the static / linear 'find the exact word' monstrosities that characterised the genre. Unfortunately the writers went further and further backwards with every game that followed. Sherlock was responsible for introducing the essential adverb ('examine closely') and the 'Lord of the Rings' games following were terrible rush jobs. Whatever happened to Phillip Mitchell?

  • Doomspoon #55 11 months ago

    @Martyn Carroll
    Coprolalia/coprographia and Tourette's aren't the same thing, under 15% of Tourette's sufferers exhibit signs of compulsive profanity.

    I loved the Infocom text adventures especially the original Zork trilogy. Stationfall, Planetfall and Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy were also favourites. Not forgetting Lurking Horror with it's excellent use of atmospheric sound samples on the Amiga.

  • savant #56 11 months ago

    Level 9 used to give out free hint booklets if you sent them a stamped addressed envelope. They even sent me a signed card with "Happy Adventuring!" written on it - loved that personal touch.

    Similarly, Magnetic Scrolls' games actually featured an in-built hint system; you'd type some codes in from the manual and it would display a helpful message.

    I have many happy memories of playing adventure games. My mate and I used to play The Hobbit after school and managed to complete it. There was much caving in of skulls and escaping in barrels.

  • ShiroBen #57 11 months ago

    I love IF, it's funny that the whole 'are games art?' debate ever fails to even mention them, to me something like Spider and Web by Andrew Plotkin is a clear example of a game as art--or to put it another way, as art that could not be anything BUT a game. Brilliant use of an unreliable narrator also, putting you in the position of a captured spy who is being forced to recount the actions you took prior to capture. It also contains the single cleverest puzzle I've ever encountered in a game. Shade, by the same author, is also excellent. You can find all of his stuff here:

    [link url=http://eblong.com/zarf/if.html
    ]http://eblong.com/zarf/if.html
    [/link]

    With some links to other 'recommended IF' and a cheat sheet for those new to the genre.

    Also, if we're talking interpreters, TADS is my favourite. It's easy to learn and rather powerful, and there's a great community out there if you need help.

  • Tyronne #58 11 months ago

    Just had a look at world of spectrum and whilst looking over the text adventures, I almost forgot to mention `Kayleth`..played that bloody thing for hours.Oh and anything by the brilliant software house `Delta 4` has got to be given a play..they did some top stuff including `bored of the rings`amongst other things.

  • Darren #59 11 months ago

    The first text adventure game I played was Twin Kingdom Valley on the C64, a game I very much enjoyed. It even had some rudimentary graphics. Worst one was called (from memory) Heroes of Karn or something like that from Interceptor, not because the game was awful (it was actually pretty good), it's just it had the most awful loading times of any game at that time - around 20-25 minutes - and it usually ended with me having to reload the entire game again! Fortunately, by the time I was hooked on these games I'd bought a 1541 disk drive for my C64 and it made games a joy to play, especially The Hobbit, which was significantly upgraded from the cassette version. Oh joyful times. :)

  • repeater #60 11 months ago

    Ouch! I scream. I'm The Incredible Hulk (Tm) now!

    That's pretty hilarious. He's not just the Incredible Hulk, but the Incredible Hulk (tm)..

  • rogermellie #61 11 months ago

    I completed the Hobbit, but sadly not any other adventure games. Most of the ones already mentioned I really struggled to get anywhere.

    The only other ones that stands out for me are Sherlock (Melbourne House) and Guild of Thieves (Magnetic Scrolls).

  • mkreku #62 11 months ago

    I'm still stuck in Guild of Thieves! I can't for the life of me build that damn fishing rod, even though I have all the materials needed. Oh well, it's only been what.. 24 years since I started it. I can wait a few decades longer :/

  • Bigglesworth #63 11 months ago

    'Place plant pot plant in plant pot.'
    I dont remember the game, but I had to wait until CVGA monthly computer magazine in the UK came out for the walkthrough.

    Sure you're remembering that right? I seem to recall that phrase was used in all the Magnetic Scrolls game manuals as an example of their powerful parser.

    The syntax was: Plant pot plant in plant pot.

  • geeza2020 #64 11 months ago

    I remember in early school days being allowed to play Granny's Garden with one other classmate by the teacher because it was "educational" while the rest of the class had to do maths! suckers! good memories :-)

  • Bigglesworth #65 11 months ago

    ^ ^ You were being groomed =)

  • geeza2020 #66 11 months ago

    yeah, me and the other kid ended up spitroasting that teacher :-P

  • jaguarwong #67 11 months ago

    I got stuck on the 'Lubricate Mechanism' bit in Aftershock too... I busted out my electronic typewriter and wrote a nice pleading letter which I posted off to the developers address on the back of the box.

    By return I got an A4 envelope containing a complete walkthrough of the whole game!

    Glory days, sometimes it's not just the nostalgia talking!

  • girth #68 11 months ago

    One of Magnetic Scroll's last efforts was 'Alice in Wonderland' on the Amiga. They had revamped the bog standard text adventure to have a full interactive set of windows that showed the visual, map, text parser etc.

    It was a truly magnificent moment in video game adventures and should have reinvented how text adventures were played - it was almost like playing a book!

    But then, text adventures went out of fashion at the same time and I think I was the only person to every play it!!

    Pick it up on emu if you can - it's worth it!! :)

  • DoctorFraggle #69 11 months ago

    Anyone remember Rebel Planet on the C64? Great game once I worked out how to get off the spaceship. Needed to type in "disembark" if I remember rightly.

  • Kalak #70 11 months ago

    The ID Speccy game was simply perfect !
    [link url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ID_(video_game)
    ]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ID_(video_g...[/link]

  • M4RKYB #71 11 months ago

    Girth, I remember Wonderland, I used to show it to my mates because it had that graphic of the caterpillar smoking a hookah pipe and at 13 I thought that was cooool.

    Fish was good fun too, think it had a similar interface to Wonderland but it was so long ago my memory is a bit shady to say the least.

  • IceCreamJonsey #72 11 months ago

    A bunch of us are discussing this article on the ifMud. I hope this is not gauche or off-putting, but I just finished a text adventure after five years of development, and the thought of reaching a bunch of IF enthusiasts here is making my heart do sultry things. It's called Cryptozookeeper, downloadable for Windows, Mac and Linux at [link url=http://www.cryptozookeeper.com.]http://www.cryptozookeeper.com.[/link] My friend Jon just said, "Tell them that the game will swear at you before you have a chance to swear at it," which says it all, I think!

  • EMarkM #73 11 months ago

    ...there was no better feeling that breaking through those brick walls. You'd enter the solution and rather than the usual replies of "I don't understand" or "I can't do that", fresh new text would flood onto the screen and the game would joyously open up.

    That just brought back so many memories, right there.

    The Hobbit, the (hilarious) Bored of the Rings, Gremlins, Quill & GAC - good days!

  • TOOTR #74 10 months ago

    Wow that really was a blast from the past - great article. I remember my first text adventures being Acornsoft's Sphinx Adventure,Castle of Riddles, Philospohers Quest. Of course The Hobbit and Twin Kingdom Valley.

    I had completely and utterly forgotten about The Incredible Hulk and it brought back a flood of memories.

    I moved on from puzzle solving adventures for a few years - and then Indiana Jones and the fate of atlantis, Monkey Island 1 and 2 came along and I don't think I played a text adventure again :(

    Lest we forget.