Old Text-Based Adventures Still Alive and Kicking

There’s a nice article written by Chris Jensen over at Game Almighty, where he talks about the status of old-school text adventures, like Zork. Now called “interactive fiction,” these were some of the first types of games ever developed for a home computer, where you’d type in commands to control the action. I always remember some of them being fun and some of them just being frustrating, usually because they required you to type in an exact line of text to move the action forward. But apparently there’s quite a large underground movement that continues to produce these types of games and even upgrade older ones. What’s interesting though is that rather than relying on innovative gameplay mechanics or graphics, all these games usually have to distinguish them is the story and the writing style. Ah, this takes me back to a simpler time, where I wanted to punch through a monitor for repeatedly telling me it didn’t understand my commands.