History of the Adventure genre, part 1

History of the Adventure genre, part 1

Feature

Adventure games are slowly making a modest combat, but the days of text-adventures are long behind us.

An Old-timer takes a look into the past

Where Have all the Text Adventures Gone?
There are a lot of complaints and discussion about today’s shallow games that concentrate merely on packaging (graphics&sounds) and hardly at all on content. When old-time gamers read through such discussions, they necessarily look back and think of how things used to be and may even remember a specific game genre that focused mainly on content.

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.

History of the Adventure genre, part 1
If the above description sounds familiar to you, you probably started playing computer games in the early 1980s or even before. You will also probably have fond memories of such Infocom game titles as Zork, Planetfall, Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and perhaps even the Leather Goddesses of Phobos. To a modern gamer, most of these titles say nothing at all and the game genre that they represent, text adventures, says even less. Therefore, it should be interesting to look back at a time when games still had more content than eye-candy.

What are these "text adventures" about?
Text adventures were a product of their time: the graphics and sound capabilities of early home computers and university network computers were virtually nonexistent and thus plain text was the best way to introduce new words and adventures to the player. When first hearing about text adventures, a modern reader may think that they are kind of “choose your own adventure” games, or perhaps they remember other classic titles, such as Nethack and Rogue, which used symbols and characters accessible on a normal keyboard to represent hallways and dungeons, and even monsters and treasures. But the actual text adventures bear no resemblance to these games.

History of the Adventure genre, part 1
Text adventure games were based on simple descriptions, such as the one at the beginning of this article, to tell the player where the player character is and what (s)he sees. The player, in turn, gives the game simple commands (e.g. “open mailbox”) to tell what (s)he wants to do next, which leads to further descriptions. Commands such as “n”, “e”, “s”, and “w” were used to move the player character around in the game world. And, yes, you had to write the commands yourself, since there were no mice around to point and click stuff for you.

Text adventures, to most of those who played them, offered the only way to really get involved with the game world. No other game genre of the time could provide such a deep experience, simply because graphics had not developed to the level where they could have been called “immersive”. Graphics, if there were any at all, played a side role. The main immersive quality came from the descriptions that the game offered to the player and their ability to engage the players’ interest. In essence, the text adventures offered a lot of content at the expense of packaging.

The rise and fall(?) of text adventures
Text adventures had their golden age in the early 1980s and the best known software house making them was Infocom. Infocom was not the only software house making text adventures, but they made, without a doubt, the best and most successful of them. Their rise to fame and the eventual collapse mark the period of text adventures very well. The company was founded in 1979 and Zork, their first game, was published in 1980. The following years saw many other successful games, but towards the end of the decade, the time of text adventures, as a commercially viable product came to an end. Infocom merged with Activision in 1986 and by the end of the decade no more text adventures were published. For many, this marked the end of an era.

History of the Adventure genre, part 1
However, alongside the commercial production of text adventures, many gamers had started to program and develop their own games. Every Commodore 64 owner will surely have played some text adventures, since, at the time, most computer magazines bundled their publications with discs containing at least a few text adventures made by enthused fans of the genre and they were the basic were in early BBS systems. Even though the interest in text adventures waxed and waned when new computers had better graphics and sound, fans were still making games after Infocom fell.

Where have the text adventures gone?
Even though text adventures are, to many, a thing in the past, there are still many devoted enthusiasts who continue programming and playing them. The terminology has changed from the early days so that text adventures are now called interactive fiction, which, in many senses, is a better term for them. Accordingly, modern text adventures share more qualities with fiction than the early games, which concentrated more often on problem solving.

Personally, I would say that every a modern gamer who has become disillusioned by the lack of depth in modern games should take a look at interactive fiction. Instead of graphics and explosive sound effects, you get truly immersive storylines and, in best cases, open-ended gameplay.

To those, who would merely like to relive some of their past adventures, there are sites that offer perfectly playable versions of the old classics as web-based applications. For example, many of Infocom’s most memorable games can be found here. Others, interested in today’s offerings, will find a lot of freeware and shareware games by looking through some interactive fiction sites, such as ifarchive.org and, more importantly, Baf’s Guide to the IF archive. This last site will tell you most that you need to know about the modern state of text adventures and it includes reviews of many new games, as well as the very useful list of yearly XYZZY awards, which are a great guide to the best of modern interactive fiction games.