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My copy of 50 Years of Text Games, which arrived recently |
It was a memorable evening in the early '80s when I first encountered text-based computer games. While staying over at my friend Eric's house, his mom took us into her work place, which I think was a Motorola office, after business hours.
She left us to ourselves in an office with a computer connected to a teleprinter that printed out everything that we typed and that it outputted, which I never encountered again. Eric already knew some of the games: a Star Trek one where you controlled the Enterprise, which we played briefly, and Adventure, which really struck a chord as we were already heavily into D&D. Eric got us past a few early obstacles, like the snake, that he knew about before we got stuck. Then we went to another office where two guys were also playing Adventure, like a scene out of AMC's Halt and Catch Fire, on a computer with a monitor. They let us watch, and based on my D&D knowledge, I suggested trying to burn the troll with the lamp oil, but it didn't work.
Without a computer at home I didn't get to play Adventure, or any text game, again for a number of years, but eventually we got a Tandy 1000 SL, and I bought Zork at Babbage's in the local mall after playing it at another kid's house and recognizing it was very similar to Adventure. Zork then led me to the myriad other Infocom titles, like Planetfall, the Lurking Horror and the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, only some of which I was able finish. I even tracked down Adventure by sending away for a shareware/freeware floppy disk that also included another simplistic D&D-inspired text game, The Beginner's Cave for the Wonderful World of Eamon system.
These were the only text-based games that I encountered back in the '80s, and after that I've only briefly played them, but always remembered the genre fondly and have been inspired by it when designing challenges for D&D adventures, like the Forgotten Smugglers' Cave, which contains an area like the maze of the twisty little passages in Adventure.
Now I just received a new book, 50 Years of Text Games, by Aaron A. Reed, that provides great context for my early adventures in text, and also shows how they've continued on over the years, and developed in different ways. Subtitled "from Oregon Trail to AI Dungeon and everything ... in between", it profiles one important game for each year from 1971 to 2019, stretching over 600 pages (!). The book started as a blog that was run throughout the year of 2021, and the posts are archived here for anyone interested. I picked up my hardcopy via a subsequent kickstarter, which I believe is now sold out, but a digital version is still available.
I've already read a few sections, including the intro to the 1970s and the entry for the ground-breaking Galatea (2000), and am enjoying the clear prose, and am looking forward to reading more. One takeway, also gleaned from following the Renga in Blue blog, is that there were far more text-based games produced back in the 70s and 80s than I ever realized.
See also: The Renga in Blue, where the author is attempting to play every text adventure game by year of release.
Really appreciate this post, and immediately adding this book to my list. Thanks!
ReplyDeleteI think a lot of us of a certain age have similar "what the heck is this?" to "play 'em all!" to "aw, those were cool, remember?" pipelines. My parents got to be friends with my pre-school best friend's parents, so we kept in touch even though we went to different schools after. Both our families got TRS-80 Color Computers at the same time (just coincidence), and somebody (my dad? His dad?) tracked down an actual cassette tape of a game we knew as "Pyramid"—it was definitely just Adventure, but someone had renamed the file on the cassette, so it wasn't until years later that I put two and two together. The two families would sit around the computer at one house or the other and shout suggestions to whoever was sitting at the keyboard reading off the text.
Got an Apple ][c a couple years later, around fourth (?) grade, and (since I was a huge Adams fan) got the Infocom "Hitchhiker's" game as a present. But I was also interested in making my own games by then, and started (and never finished) a text adventure with occasional graphics.
By middle school, my big brother and I were Infocom die-hards (we did manage to win almost every one of them, though I'll admit he did Lurking Horror without me because it gave me nightmares!) and "serious" (for pre-teens with no particular access or resources) programmers, designing our own games and trying to make them happen. I'm the micro guy—I kept drilling down to see how we could emulate all the little details in our favorite games as precisely as possible. He was always the macro guy—he kept focused on the bigger picture of simply "will it work well enough." So, y'know, obviously his game was the only one we ever finished (but, hey, at least partly because I figured out a lot of the little bits and features he could use in it!), but it was awesome and we were really proud of it. (I've been slowly converting it to a browser-based game whenever I get time so that his kids and mine might be able to play it without an emulator!)
We got into MUDs briefly in college, and made our own (the code—a major departure from stock Circle—was complete and did some really cool things, but we had to go out into the real world and never got to finish building the game world). Later on, we dabbled with MMOs, but to be honest, they never quite captured the magic of the text adventures we dug as kids. (We did start dabbling with making our own there, too—doofuses that we were—but without full time to devote to it, our mere two-man team was never going to make that happen. With him gone, I'm pretty sure my one-man team is even less likely to find the time and resources.)
Looking forward to checking out Aaron Reed's book; there'll be a lot of cool memories welling up as I read it, I'm sure!