The Antagonists: The rise and fall of type-in text games

This is a great article -- but (some) commenters are missing that &quot;type-in text games&quot; means two different things in context: <i>text games</i> are games whose interface is primarily text-based, but <i>type-in games</i> here means &quot;games distributed as source code printed in magazines or books&quot;. This is something that basically disappeared from computing history by the mid-1980s, as it stopped being even remotely practical as a distribution method.<p>This article, by the way, is sort of bonus material from Aaron Reed&#x27;s <i>50 Years of Text Games,</i> which is phenomenally interesting if you&#x27;re the sort interested in that corner of computing history. While many &quot;text games&quot; are parser-based like Infocom&#x27;s text adventures, Reed also gets into Twine games, Fallen London, Dwarf Fortress, King of Dragon Pass, ARGs and more.

I learned English as a second language from playing Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards when I was a kid.<p>Didn&#x27;t know how to pronounce &quot;Suit&quot; until I was about 18.<p>To this day I am disappointed by the &quot;Point &amp; Click&quot; remakes. It was probably the first hint that society as a whole develops in ways that does not always align with my own interests.<p>Building a story out of text, as opposed to visual imagery, allows for a different kind of phantasy. I like both, and I sure miss the amazing feel of interactive text and graphics based adventures that Sierra produced in its early days.

Took me a while to realize that this was not only a game which you interacted with by typing commands, but also a game which you actually had to <i>type in</i>. I was aware of the type-in programs published in 80s computer magazines, I actually typed a few of them into my Atari 800 back in the day, but didn&#x27;t know there were also <i>books</i> containing type-in programs.

Interesting article.<p>In a way, computer games are an evolution of interactive storytelling, so I don&#x27;t see the &quot;fall&quot; of text-based games as a negative, but more as the result of the progression of the electronic medium as a storytelling device.<p>Before computer games, I remember being entranced by Choose Your Own Adventure books. Text adventure games are an evolution of this concept, and as the medium got more advanced, users&#x2F;readers&#x2F;players demanded more interactivity.<p>MUDs are still popular with those who enjoy them, just as books are still read when interactivity is not the focus. But overall, interactive storytelling has evolved in many ways from what it was capable of 40 years ago, and most fans moved on with it.<p>In the future, interactivity will only increase, as we move towards interacting with &quot;real&quot; AI characters, where the world and the story itself can be created just-in-time, versus the ahead-of-time process we use now. So the stories and experiences of each player will be unique to them, rather than preconceived by writers, designers and programmers. This is exciting, and somewhat scary, depending on how you look at it. :)

I got a subscription to <i>Family and Home Computing</i> about a year or two before we could afford a computer. Usually I’d throw the old issues away but one had the game of Asteroids in the back in BASIC. I held onto that one. A game I didn’t have to beg my parents to buy? Yes please.<p>When I finally got a computer I typed it in, which took impatient little me days to complete. And when it was done it did not work. I spot checked my transcription and couldn’t find much. I had written hundreds of lines of BASIC total in a class and this was three columns of print over something like, four or five pages. No way was I up to debugging that. One of the big disappointments of my childhood.

I still keep and maintain some text-based games. I even wrote a new one last year to further familiarize myself with golang. There&#x27;s something special in them. You can imagine a full world, 3d, or otherwise. Yet you are limited to ASCII. You can get away with a lot in ascii. From Diku, to Merc, to Smaug... I try to keep the codebases building using the latest gcc.

I wonder if a modern equivalent of a game like this would sell at all. Modern supposedly story-driven games often have extremely short flavor&#x2F;clue text so as not to interrupt the flow. Reading the clue docs outside of the game would allow you to enjoy the experience even through moments when you aren&#x27;t playing the game itself, and it wouldn&#x27;t break the pacing. I suppose the game could give you 30-40 page docs or book chapters as PDFs throughout the story as you unlock them by finding books in the game.

Wizardry 8 (2001) probably had the last remnant of a type-in interface for the communication with NPCs - you could type your lines directly and they reacted to keywords. You could ask for things you&#x27;ve heard somewhere and learn something new.<p>The idea isn&#x27;t dead though - since GPT-2 appeared, people have been trying to use chatbots for role-playing games again. With GPT-4 it&#x27;s almost possible as it can mostly keep track of the inventory and more or less stick to the rules.

What a fascinating trip back in time. I had almost forgotten all the time I spent typing up code listings from the back of Usborne computer books as a kid in the late 80s.<p>It was really a great way to learn programming, although I remember the frustrations trying to work out which variation of BASIC (Commodore, Spectrum, BBC Micro or another one) would work on my ’286 with GWBASIC.

Setting aside the type-in aspect, the idea of having a separate book (or other media) closely integrated with a game is interesting. I&#x27;m not sure how much sense it makes nowadays, since you can easily have a PDF&#x2F;movie&#x2F;etc on the computer as well, and once you&#x27;re doing that you might as well integrate it fully into the game. Shenzhen I&#x2F;O did something like this; it came with a list of datasheets for the electronic components you used in the game, and the devs recommended printing them out and putting them in a binder for added immersion. Some of the other Zachtronics games might have done something similar, I&#x27;m not sure.

This is a little beyond the development of text-based games, but I just want to give a shout out to Ray Dunakin&#x27;s wonderful point-and-click indie creations that can be found here: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.raydunakin.com&#x2F;Site&#x2F;Games.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.raydunakin.com&#x2F;Site&#x2F;Games.html</a><p>I spent countless hours as a kid on &quot;Twisted!&quot;, &quot;A Mess O&#x27; Trouble&quot;, and &quot;Another Fine Mess&quot;.<p>Some of these titles are being re-released on OSX which is exciting for me (and thank you HN crowd for causing me to investigate what happened to Dunakin&#x27;s work!).

It&#x27;s peculiar how you can write an article subtitled &quot;The rise and fall of type-in text games&quot; without even mentioning the words Sierra, Zork or Infocom.<p>Btw, if you played the original Sierra games you&#x27;ll find this story very interesting (and saddening), How Sierra Was Captured, Then Killed, by a Massive Accounting Fraud: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vice.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;article&#x2F;z3vem8&#x2F;inside-story-sierra-online-death-cuc-cendant-fraud" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vice.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;article&#x2F;z3vem8&#x2F;inside-story-sierra-o...</a>

I thought this was going to be about the inability to type in games. Hearthstone doesn&#x27;t allow you to communicate with your opponents. Or trade with them for that matter

Lair of the Minotaur (proto zork) was the gateway computer drug for me. i still have an old spiral bound graph notebook from 87 which i used first to map out the dungeon and then later create my own. what a marvelous time to be a child in america

I have fond memories of King’s Quest and Space Quest on 5.25&quot; floppies!<p>In the beginning of Space Quest I think you had to use a piece of glass from the broken canopy of the ship to redirect a laser that was blocking the path.<p>Good times!

I miss MUD&#x27;s

I grew up on Infocom games on apple iie. However now the focus is largely on graphics to the extreme, it could be that a lot of people simply cannot read and write well enough to get into a text based game, they had a comeback during the dialup internet days with Muds. If one went and then had such a game translated into enough languages perhaps it could find a world wide niche.