Archived from groups: rec.games.int-fiction (More info?)
Just saw this yesterday in the National Post, one of Canada's
nationally-distributed newspapers:
------------------
Actually, there weren't any pictures at all
1970s text games are preserved by dedicated fans
Adam McDowell
National Post
Wednesday, March 16, 2005
Before the invention of graphics, when a gamer entered the darkness of
an evil cavern they would do so armed only with their imagination and
the written words supplied by a talented wizard of the text gaming.
These text-based adventures, which originated in the early 1970s, were
quickly dispatched to the virtual dumper when graphics arrived, never,
it was thought, to be seen again.
But a dedicated band of amateur adventurers has kept alive these classic
text-based games, and created many new ones. They've even rebranded the
genre as Interactive Fiction (or IF) to acknowledge the evolution of
text games.
"It's worth preserving the old works of interactive fiction. They're
part of computing history, and offer a glimpse into how this form of
entertainment developed," says Stephen Granade, who helps maintain the
Interactive Fiction Archive (www.ifarchive.org), a repository for
text-only games, most downloadable for free.
In text-based games, players move between "rooms," using one- or
two-word commands such as "open door" and "take sword" to interact with
the environment described. There's no time pressure: A command prompt
will wait for eternity for a player to decide what to do next. Early IF
games typically featured Dungeons and Dragons-style settings.
Text adventure games began in the 1970s with Will Crowther and Don
Woods's Colossal Cave Adventure (also called simply Adventure), in which
the player explores a treasure-stocked cavern. The game ran on an
enormous, expensive mainframe computer.
Adventure spread like a pandemic through the ARPAnet, the forerunner of
the Internet. Among its addicts was Scott Adams.
"I would come in before work and play a few hours, and stay after work
to play for a few hours [more]," Adams says. "I started my own game
almost immediately."
In 1978, Adams proved that a text adventure game could be made for home
computer when he released Adventureland for the Tandy TRS-80 Level II.
"[It] was the Gutenberg Bible of text adventures."
Many commercial games, such as the popular Zork, followed, but they
disappeared just as quickly after about 1980 when adventure games with
graphics started to appear. The genre didn't die, however. It went
underground.
In 1992, IF enthusiast Volker Blasius started the IF Archive, which
brought together remaining text adventure files and fans from across the
Internet. Paul O'Brian, who runs a newsletter for IF fans, says the
archive brought text gamers together. "The fact that people can go to
one predictable, reliable space ... has given the community a focus to
organize around."
For the past decade, Granade has unleashed the text-gaming community's
creativity by running IF Comp, an annual competition involving 40 to 50
new entries. "There started to be this recognition that there was a
renaissance occurring in amateur IF," says O'Brian, the 2004 winner for
his Luminous Horizon. "Because there's no longer a customer out there or
a profit to be made, that has opened the form up artistically."
For example, the fourth-place finisher at IF Comp 2004, Sting of the
Wasp, is set at a country club. The player controls a classy but
conniving woman who must destroy evidence that she's cheating on her
husband. "It's a long way from 'Kill troll with sword,' " O'Brian says.
Die-hard IF fans know their community of perhaps a thousand people will
remain small. But there's hope in that there are uses for games without
graphics even in 2005 -- some people like to load them onto PDAs, for
example, and they're relatively easy to program. Adams (who doesn't play
text-based games anymore) says they have one key advantage over ordinary
commercial games:
"No matter what the graphics are, your mind's eye always seems to
provide better."
© National Post 2005
Just saw this yesterday in the National Post, one of Canada's
nationally-distributed newspapers:
------------------
Actually, there weren't any pictures at all
1970s text games are preserved by dedicated fans
Adam McDowell
National Post
Wednesday, March 16, 2005
Before the invention of graphics, when a gamer entered the darkness of
an evil cavern they would do so armed only with their imagination and
the written words supplied by a talented wizard of the text gaming.
These text-based adventures, which originated in the early 1970s, were
quickly dispatched to the virtual dumper when graphics arrived, never,
it was thought, to be seen again.
But a dedicated band of amateur adventurers has kept alive these classic
text-based games, and created many new ones. They've even rebranded the
genre as Interactive Fiction (or IF) to acknowledge the evolution of
text games.
"It's worth preserving the old works of interactive fiction. They're
part of computing history, and offer a glimpse into how this form of
entertainment developed," says Stephen Granade, who helps maintain the
Interactive Fiction Archive (www.ifarchive.org), a repository for
text-only games, most downloadable for free.
In text-based games, players move between "rooms," using one- or
two-word commands such as "open door" and "take sword" to interact with
the environment described. There's no time pressure: A command prompt
will wait for eternity for a player to decide what to do next. Early IF
games typically featured Dungeons and Dragons-style settings.
Text adventure games began in the 1970s with Will Crowther and Don
Woods's Colossal Cave Adventure (also called simply Adventure), in which
the player explores a treasure-stocked cavern. The game ran on an
enormous, expensive mainframe computer.
Adventure spread like a pandemic through the ARPAnet, the forerunner of
the Internet. Among its addicts was Scott Adams.
"I would come in before work and play a few hours, and stay after work
to play for a few hours [more]," Adams says. "I started my own game
almost immediately."
In 1978, Adams proved that a text adventure game could be made for home
computer when he released Adventureland for the Tandy TRS-80 Level II.
"[It] was the Gutenberg Bible of text adventures."
Many commercial games, such as the popular Zork, followed, but they
disappeared just as quickly after about 1980 when adventure games with
graphics started to appear. The genre didn't die, however. It went
underground.
In 1992, IF enthusiast Volker Blasius started the IF Archive, which
brought together remaining text adventure files and fans from across the
Internet. Paul O'Brian, who runs a newsletter for IF fans, says the
archive brought text gamers together. "The fact that people can go to
one predictable, reliable space ... has given the community a focus to
organize around."
For the past decade, Granade has unleashed the text-gaming community's
creativity by running IF Comp, an annual competition involving 40 to 50
new entries. "There started to be this recognition that there was a
renaissance occurring in amateur IF," says O'Brian, the 2004 winner for
his Luminous Horizon. "Because there's no longer a customer out there or
a profit to be made, that has opened the form up artistically."
For example, the fourth-place finisher at IF Comp 2004, Sting of the
Wasp, is set at a country club. The player controls a classy but
conniving woman who must destroy evidence that she's cheating on her
husband. "It's a long way from 'Kill troll with sword,' " O'Brian says.
Die-hard IF fans know their community of perhaps a thousand people will
remain small. But there's hope in that there are uses for games without
graphics even in 2005 -- some people like to load them onto PDAs, for
example, and they're relatively easy to program. Adams (who doesn't play
text-based games anymore) says they have one key advantage over ordinary
commercial games:
"No matter what the graphics are, your mind's eye always seems to
provide better."
© National Post 2005
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