Adventureland

I can credit this game with my love of text adventure games. I played it when I was quite young on my Vic-20. And even though the game is sparsely detailed with a frustrating parser compared to today's games, it was quite exciting and kept me coming back to try and solve its unfair puzzles. Not really much to look at now, it might be worth checking out.

(Spoiler - click to show)The bear puzzle. Am I the only one who, even at the young age I was, solved it by becoming completely frustrated with the bear and typing screw bear? The old parser only read the first three letters of every word and the intended solution was, apparently, scream bear. So imagine my surprise when I typed Screw Bear and the response was 'The bear is so startled it falls off the ledge.' Awesome. I think it's the only game I ever had to resort to bestiality to solve a problem. Thanks Scott Adams!

This was, I believe, the first commercial text adventure. Certainly the first successful one; although Adventure and Dungeon were much more descriptive, this game fit on everyone's systems.

Gargoyle can play this game if you change .dat files to .saga. Scott Adams' website has an interpreter for these games as of 2017.

This game is ultra-minimalistic, with room descriptions often empty or as short as possible. The parser takes only two words at a time; only the first three letters of each word are read.

The game is actually quite fun, especially if you're willing to spend a long time playing around with it. It achieves the 'long time'-ness by having several situations that lock you out of victory without you realizing it, and by requiring a lot of combinations of items.

Before I played it, I thought it was an Adventure rip off, but they are very, very dissimilar. It's like the way that Antz and A Bug's Life are similar, or Monster's Inc and Shrek. They are vaguely similar, but not really.

I can remember when I first sat behind my C64, I was young and hooked on this game. Though it hasn't aged that well I can still sit down and play this for hours at end. If you haven't played this piece of history I say you should. It's a nice look back to what the past was like.