50 Years of Text Games

50 Years of Text Games

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1992: Silverwolf
In 1985, a mysterious group of women calling themselves the "Games Mistresses" released the first of a series of text adventure games. The story behind…
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Aaron A. Reed
20
1984: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
When the best-loved makers of text adventures met the best-loved sci-fi satirist of the decade, the result was an unforgettable classic of interactive…
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Aaron A. Reed
13
1982: The Hobbit
Veronika Megler just wanted a part-time job while she finished her college degree. She didn't realize it would end with her writing one of the first…
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Aaron A. Reed
5
1977: Zork
When four MIT hackers decide they can make a better Adventure, they start building a game that will still be topping bestseller charts eight years…
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Aaron A. Reed
2
2006: Dwarf Fortress
The text of Dwarf Fortress and procedural tales so expansive no human could ever explore them all.
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Aaron A. Reed
1983: Suspended
A young writer crosses paths with the designer of Zork, sparking a surprisingly experimental game where you experience reality from six unique…
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Aaron A. Reed
4
2017: Universal Paperclips
The dawn of incremental games: how some of the most virally addictive games of the 2010s were nothing but text and numbers going up.
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Aaron A. Reed
3
1988: P.R.E.S.T.A.V.B.A.
In communist Czechoslovakia, a network of teenage hackers discovers that text games are a completely uncensored medium.
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Aaron A. Reed
3
1979: The Cave of Time
A middle-aged lawyer lets his kids Choose Their Own Adventure for their bedtime story, planting the seeds for a publishing phenomenon “as contagious as…
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Aaron A. Reed
4
1980: MUD
The story of how dozens of British college students would stay up all night to adventure together in the game that would spawn a thousand sequels.
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Aaron A. Reed
9
Business Wargames: Early Complex Text Games
The quest for the earliest transcript of a computer game uncovers a surprisingly complex computer strategy game from the 1950s.
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Aaron A. Reed
8
The Antagonists
Type-in books once promised full computer games encoded in the pages of a printed paperback. But the delicate balancing act of a game easy enough to…
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Aaron A. Reed
3
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