50 Years of Text Games - From Oregon Trail to A.I. Dungeon - A definitive book about the first half-century of interactive fiction. https://if50.textories.com/

The book covers one text game from each year between 1971 (when The Oregon Trail was first played on a teletype) to 2020, with an in-depth analysis of how it worked, why it’s interesting, and what it says about interactive fiction. A huge swath of genres are covered, from parser games to hypertext to VR poetry to browser games to dating sims to MUDS to BBS games and more.

Partial excerpts (antilibrary)

Glossary

Glossary

choice-based: In reference to interactive fiction games, those that provide a list of actions the player can take at each turn (contrast with the open-ended prompt in a parser-based game, or clickable links in hypertext fiction).

interactive fiction: In this book, any text-based interactive story (though the term has been used in various ways by various people, often to mean parser-based text adventures specifically).

MMO, MMORPG

MUD

NPC: Non-Player

PvP: Player versus Player

roguelike: A style of game named after Rogue [1980] characterized by exploring dangerous randomly generated environments, a top-down view that uses text characters as surrogate graphics, and frequent deaths and restarts as a core part of its gameplay.

Usenet: A distributed online discussion network organized by topic popular in the 90s and early 2000s; groups like rec.arts.int-fiction hosted important early text game design conversations

visual novel: A style of interactive story popularized in Japan in the 1990s and 2000s, characterized by conversation-heavy stories illustrated by full-screen character portraits

Introduction

Introduction

The earliest version of The Oregon Trail—the text-only original, made long before the green-tinged Apple remake played by 80s kids in their school computer labs—debuted in a Minnesota classroom on December 3, 1971.

In this book we’ll take a journey through fifty text games, one for each year of the medium’s first half century. We’ll take a close look at how each game works, what it says, who made it, and how it fits into the rapidly changing historical and technological context of its time. These aren’t necessarily the most famous fifty games from these years, nor the best-loved, the most influential, or the most important (whatever that might mean). The constraint of picking one and only one game for each year instead suggests a grand tour

Why do these games matter? Unlike mainstream computer games, they’re often made by sole creators with something to say, and the freedom to explore and experiment with new ways of saying it.

What is a text game? In brief, it’s a game you want to share excerpts from, not screenshots. The broader game industry is primarily visual

Text games are interactive, which differentiates them from animated concrete poetry or digital word art. They use words as words, not as placeholder graphics as in roguelikes (which we’ll mostly skip over but for a few exceptions that also meaningfully engage with language).

the games discussed in this book can be roughly clustered by technology, structure, or audience into about a dozen nonexclusive categories

Resource Management. Games primarily concerned with managing a set of numeric qualities

Parser. A simulated world explored by typing imperative commands that are then “parsed” into valid actions. Also called text adventures or interactive fiction, parser games were massively popular in the 1980s and continue to be made today. Adventure [1976]; Zork

MUD (Multi-User Dungeon).

Hypertext. A tree of story nodes often explorable in nonlinear order, generally navigated by clicking linked words. Uncle Roger [1986]; Patchwork Girl [1995]; Howling Dogs [2012]

Choice-Based. Story nodes connected by explicit decision points

Storylet-Driven. An unordered set of story nodes presented to the player in an order based on randomness, simulation qualities, or player stats.

Procedural Story. Interactive narratives shaped by complex procedures as well as player choices

Roguelike. A challenging world with procedurally generated elements, often explored from a top-down perspective.

Hunt the Wumpus [1973]; Super Star Trek [1974];

ARG (Alternate Reality Game).

The Beast [2001]

BBS. Multiplayer games for a bulletin board system

Play-by-Mail

Experimental

While you can read this book straight through, each entry is also cross-linked to other games connected through threads of inspiration, technology, or tradition

Game names match the title screen or opening text of the original release (hence Adventure, not Colossal Cave Adventure or ADVENT)

The book is divided into five parts by decade, each beginning with a brief summary

“What has poetry to do with computer software?” asked Robert Pinsky in 1995, precisely the middle of this history. Pinsky, a future US poet laureate, had a decade earlier authored the surreal text adventure Mindwheel

Robert Pinsky. 1995. “The Muse in the Machine: Or, The Poetics of Zork.”

1976—Adventure

1976—Adventure

1980—MUD

But Trubshaw, at some point, was also meant to be graduating. By the end of the 1980 spring term he’d handed over the MUD code to Bartle, who would continue improving it in one form or another for nearly a decade.

Bartle broke from most earlier games by setting the majority of his world aboveground, in a realm called the Land filled with magical glades, soft pine forests, misty graveyards, and ancient ruins.

2010—Digital: A Love Story

Ren’Py

Opening Text. Using Your New Modem

Here’s a local BBS I recommend looking at: 698-5519.

Connecting to a BBS—a bulletin board system, the cheapest way to find online communities before the mid-1990s [see 1991]—meant punching in a phone number and waiting for your modem to negotiate with a distant computer.

Finding boards, new virtual islands to explore, was a bit like scavenging for buried treasure

A private offer to dial a less advertised system had all the thrill of a whispered invitation to a speakeasy

It’s an experience very different from browsing the modern web, one that few people too young to have lived it can easily appreciate. Digital: A Love Story recreates this early online world in loving detail, capturing the texture and flavor of BBS life with a palpable nostalgia and precision

But its author never experienced that life firsthand. In 1988, the year the game is set, she hadn’t even been born.