50 Years of Text Games: From Oregon Trail to AI Dungeon

This book started as an email newsletter that I subscribed to. I then backed a Kickstarter-ish project to get it published.

It’s exactly what it claims to be: a comprehensive history of text adventure games – the games were you make specific decisions, usually in a branch narrative, often by typing things like “GO NORTH” or “TAKE NECKLACE” or something.

I always loved these, but I’m bad at them and that makes me sad. They’re always full of puzzles, and I’m somehow terrible at solving the puzzles. I get impatient and quit. I never did finish Zork.

(A recent attempt to solve Blue Prince has similarly failed. It’s not a text game, but has that same vibe.)

There are lots of those games in there, but there are some other genres as well. He covers The Cave of Time, which is the first of the “Choose Your Own Adventure” books – so, a text game, just on paper instead of on a screen. Also, there are some text-ish games, like Super Star Trek and Hunt the Wumpus, which are not branching narratives, but more like real-time strategy from the command line.

I did not read the entire book, because in many places it was talking about games for which I had no context. But I did browse it, and read many chapters about games that I specifically remember.

It’s very well-researched. The author has done a lovely job of talking about the game mechanics along with discussion the societal and technological environment and trends that existed at the time the game was produced. In some senses, it’s a history of computing itself, from a specific angle.

Book Info