Over the next days and weeks I plan to introduce a few games from one of my favorite genres - Text Adventures.  Also called "interactive fiction" by fans of the genre today, the games were plentiful and popular on the C64 and earlier computers, mainly due to the fact that they were relatively easy to program and did not require fancy graphics for immersive gameplay.

They were among the first real "computer games", and by their nature (text entry via a keyboard was usually required) were not suited to Nintendo-style game consoles that had only joysticks or gamepads.  Because many young people today have grown up gaming with console games and mouse controlled PC games, text adventures have been pushed from mainstream gaming into a niche over the last two decades. 

The concept of a basic text adventure, for those unfamiliar, involves the player typing in commands such as GET LAMP, or GO EAST to move around and interact with objects in a setting described by paragraphs of text.  One of the most universal commands in a C64 text adventure is "LOOK", used to describe the surroundings.  A description might read:

"As you wake up you realize that you have fallen into a deep pit, your fall apparently padded by layers of rotting leaves.  The light is dim this far down, but you can see the faint outline of a door with an iron handle at one end of the pit.  A large, smooth river rock is also by your feet, and you feel glad that you did not land head first onto it. 

What do you do?"

Your reactions might include GET ROCK or TAKE ROCK and then OPEN DOOR.  What the game designer expects of you might not be so simple or straightforward, however.  Some creative thinking might be required.  The door might not budge.  EXAMINE HANDLE might reveal (to your touch) that the handle has a button latch that is hopelessly rusted tight, but also feels a bit brittle and wobbly.  The command USE ROCK ON HANDLE might produce the desired result of breaking the rusted handle and latch and allowing you to open the door.

Text adventures used "parsers" to handle input from a player that were of varying complexity, from very simple commands like GET KEY, to more complicated sentences like BASH THE HANDLE WITH THE ROCK.  If you are playing a low-budget or little-known C64 text adventure, it's safe to assume that the parser will not be sophisticated, and will reply with the (sometimes annoying) "I don't understand" to complex commands.  Think of the parser in a typical C64 text adventure game like a simple minded robot you are trying to verbally command.  The parser can only understand what vocabulary the programmer took the time to enter. 

On the other hand, even the most simple parsers generally understood shortcuts, such as "W" instead of "GO WEST".  This is a welcome time saver, especially if the exits in a location are not clear, and you need to try another direction.

Scott Adams is an iconic figure in early Text Adventure gaming, and hints for his classic game Adventureland (available across many different computer platforms) read:

Draw a map as you go, there are a lot more places than you think, and without a map you will end up going round in circles or missing areas which you haven't tried. It doesn't need to be perfect as long as you have some record of where you have been and what you've found (as well as where you found it).

Examine things you find and try to remember that most problems have solutions that require no more than some careful thought and a little common sense. If you get stuck try typing HELP -- you may or may not get assistance but you won't know until you ask. And be careful about assuming things, it can be fatal.

To speed things up you may use the following abbreviations N, S, E, W, U, D, for Go North, South, East, West, Up or Down.

I is short for Inventory and will list what you're carrying.

Some (but not all) of the words available that you may find useful are:

Get, Take, Drop, Go, Climb, Jump, Enter, Examine, Go, Leave, Move, Quit, Say, Wear, Read, Save, Light, Pull, Push and Look ... There are others!!!

Games written by the software developer Infocom had some of the best parsers and understanding of a wider vocabulary than most C64 adventures (including Scott Adams' early games).   Infocom's games, such as the Zork series, are often held up as the golden example of a perfect text adventure of the "golden age" of text adventures.  They had complex stories and character interaction, great puzzles and made for entertaining reading.

But if you are looking for some simple cave crawling fun, or the ability to play a game from start to finish quickly, then there are many examples of less involved text adventures available for retro C64 gamers today.

Some text adventures on the C64 used simple graphics on the upper half of the screen to enhance the gameplay, usually called Graphic Text Adventures.  These later evolved into Graphic Adventures that required moving a character on screen and performing similar actions with icons rather than typing commands, such as in the King's Quest series of games.  Some graphic adventure games later went to the extreme where they eventually left most text and speech out altogether in games like Myst.

Perhaps it is because my first computer game was a text adventure (on a Commodore VIC-20), however, that I find reading descriptions in text adventures fire up my imagination the most, and the most enjoyable of the genre.

Look forward to a few "walkabouts" in the coming days as I will bring some of the more enjoyable text adventures from the C64 to light, and perhaps some that you veterans have never heard of.