Typing in old school video games- why?

[Aslan of Narnia]

I've been playing a lot of old dos games(all freeware), and I'm enjoying them. However I'm wondering about the need for using text to complete character actions.

Perhaps it's because I've too used playing games that don't implement typing in "run" to run, but why did old dos computer games have you type out commands such as talk, open or pick up? Coding Limitations? A better challenge? Have people type faster?

[Aslan of Narnia]

And I'm guessing it maybe had to do with having to type out everything in dos, like c:/program files/game/game.exe, excute game.exe(or however you did it)?

[RealityChuck]

How else could you imput data?

Remember, the mouse hadn't been invented. I suppose you could hav used the function keys, but that would have limited you to ten (later 12) commands, or have had to change the commands as you went along, confusing the users.

[Aslan of Narnia]

No mouses invented then? :eek:

Thanks.

[lno]

The mouse had been invented decades before the computer game industry developed, to be persnickety, but it had not become a common everyday attachment to the typical home user's computer (yes, you Mac people can nag at me now) for some time.

Going on memory, mouse interfaces in games began to appear in the mid to late 80s - the earliest I can think of offhand is Wasteland, by Interplay, released in 1988. It took a while to catch on - the infamous Doom was released by iD Software in 1993, and that didn't even have the mouselook that people take for granted in FPS games today.

[Mahaloth]

Originally posted by Aslan2
No mouses invented then? :eek:

Thanks.

Well, Xerox invented them in the '70's, but they weren't used widely until the Macintosh computer in 1984.

[Terminus Est]

[insert ruefully shaking head smiley here]
Kids these days.

[Trigonal Planar]

I think simple hardware restrictions had a lot to do with it. It wasn't possible to include lots of fancy graphics and interface elements. Programming in a list of commands in some kind of array was likely the most memory-efficient way of doing it.

[Riboflavin]

Originally posted by Aslan2
And I'm guessing it maybe had to do with having to type out everything in dos, like c:/program files/game/game.exe, excute game.exe(or however you did it)?

Man, I feel old now - FYI, in DOS you were limited to an 8 character filename and 3 letter extension (and no spaces), so "program files" wasn't possible back in the day.

Anyway, the one reason which has been pointed out, is that mice were not common. While they had been around for ages, it wasn't until the late 80s that they were common enough to bother with for games, and wasn't really until the 90s that you could count on a mouse. That limits you to a keyboard interface.

The other one is that you were really limited in memory for DOS games, especially DOS games built to run on computers without extended or expanded memory. In a lot of cases, game developers couldn't afford to include both an alias and regular command for individual actions (or something to automatically parse them) because it would eat up precious RAM.

[Joe Random]

Man, questions like this make me feel old, and I'm only in my twenties!

I used to love the old Sierra "Quest" games, text interface an all. I fondly remember hours of frustration trying to find the exact words I needed to use to accomplish something.

"What, exactly, does the parser expect me to call that thing? A dresser? A chest? A wardrobe? Something else? And should I be trying to move it, slide it, push it, pull it, use it, or what? I know there's a secret passage behind the thing. Maybe it's actually a tapestry or something. Hard to tell with the glorious sixteen shades of monochrome at 200x160 resolution. Maybe it's a frog, Or a cow, or a tophat. Hell, I don't know, I'll just keep typing random words until something happens."

Ah, those were the days.

[ike9898]

I remember lots of games that were ALL text. Sort of like playing a dungeon and dragons game. You read a description of the area you are in, then you type what you want to do ('run west;' hit troll'). One was called Zork. Things have come a long ways since the early 80's (By the way, at the time I would have been using my family's Commodore 64, which all have plenty of graphical games played with a joystick).

[Diceman]

I used to love text-adventure games. I've probably still got a Z-Machine emulator somewhere on my harddrive.

Chalk up another twenty-something guy who suddenly feels old.

[aaslatten]

I agree with Diceman. The text-based adventures were actually more challenging and enjoyable. You had to direct your character's actions as well as think of HOW to word it. It was sometimes pretty damn tricky.

I lost interest when they phased out the text, which is OK, since I wasn't their target market anymore.

[Terminus Est]

Text adventures, A.K.A interactive fiction, are alive and well and still being written (http://www.ifarchive.org/).

[Hauky]

Heck, we had to write a text adventure in Java in my last programming class. ;) (Granted, it used a Windows GUI, and, well, it was Java, but you did have to type the commands into a textbox, so there!)

[Walloon]

The computer mouse was invented by Douglas Engelbart in 1964, and he filed for a patent (http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/bl_computer_mouse_patent.htm) in 1967.

The first mass-produced personal computer with a mouse (or for that matter, clickable icons) was the Apple Lisa (http://lisa.sunder.net/mirrors/Simon/Lisa/What.html), in 1983. The Lisa was a failure, but the mouse reappeared the following year on the first Apple Macintosh.

[Thudlow Boink]

Originally posted by Aslan2
why did old dos computer games have you type out commands such as talk, open or pick up? See, I read this question and I thought, "How else would you let the computer know what you wanted it to do?" I suppose they could have given you a menu of choices, but this way you had the illusion of having endless possibilities, and you had to think up for yourself the right thing to do instead of just picking it off of a list.

Do you realize that many of the original IBM PCs were hooked up to monochrome monitors that could only display text—no graphics?

[Cillasi]

I loved the old Infocom games. They were the best.

Scott Adams also wrote some great games and had a great sense of humor. So many times, you'd get frustrated and type dumb things - too many times you found he had coded an answer for the dumb things you typed. It was a great frustration buster.

There was a point in one of his games where lots of people got stuck. You were trying to traverse a cavern and as you rounded a bend, a big bear was in the way. Nobody could figure out the proper command to pass the bear. Finally, an extremely frustrated player typed "Screw the bear" and the bear "was so startled he fell over the precipice" or something to that effect. So, we were all forced to "screw the bear" to continue with the game.

Finally, the author decided to explain. The parser only reads the first 3 letters of command words. Therefore, "screw" is read by the parser as "scr" and accepted as the correct command. The intended command was "(scr)eam."

If anyone still remembers Scott Adams' games, he has a website here: http://www.msadams.com/new/index.htm

[GuanoLad]

It would be so cool to go back in time to 1983, and watch myself struggle through a text adventure on a ZX-Spectrum, and be able to show myself the state of the art games of 2003.

That would just rock!

[commasense]

Originally posted by Aslan2
And I'm guessing it maybe had to do with having to type out everything in dos, like c:/program files/game/game.exe, excute game.exe(or however you did it)?

I guess I'm the only old computer user here with enough brain capacity left to point out that under DOS we used backslashes, not slashes:

c:\pgmfiles\game\game.exe

Just to gauge the ages here: anyone remember CP/M?

[furt]

Aslan2, be careful with those games, or you are likely to be eaten by a grue.

[Nichol_storm]

When I was in elementary school, we played this great adventure game where you got to be a princess on a quest for various magical artifacts and such. We'd hang over each other's shoulders and help the player direct the action. No one ever won this game, to my remembrance, but it was still fun.

One of the most amusing moments occured when we were trying to fetch a prize that was in a tree. The player typed in "Climb the tree" and the computer spat back: "But she [the princess character] will ruin her dress!"

So we typed in "Take off dress". The computer responded with an indignant: "Not in front of the player!" Hilarity ensued.

.:Nichol:.

[RickJay]

Boy, I think the OP has established himself as a youngster.

My first PC did not have a hard drive. It did not have a mouse. It had a color monitor that could display exactly four colors. It did not have a sound card of any kind. There was no modem or connectivity to the outside world of any sort. Of course, at that time, there was no Internet. Everything was text; they had not even invented a way to display different fonts on the screen. And that was just 17 years ago.

[Mehitabel]

ADVENTURE! Precursor to Zork.

typ msyba

was a typical command.

Mmmm, Leather Goddesses of Phobos. You could choose a level to play at from innocent to filthy. Once you’d rescue a prince/princess; then you’d intrude on him while he was bathing.
At the clean level he’d blush and shoo you away; intermediate levels, he got more and more bold; at lewd level, you could order him “lick me!” and he would. And you’d get details on how you felt, a loooong paragraph’s worth. Of course, almost everybody played all lewd all the time.

As you can tell, you could also choose your sex; if you were male the game went one way, if you were female another, although I think male was the default because all that happened was that everything changed genders but behaved in traditionally male ways. The Leather Goddess at the end remained the same, though, so if you were playing a girl you had your first lesbian encounter ;)

We didn’t mind the text games because it was all we had. They were generally well-written and tons of fun.

[Cleophus]

I administrate a MOO used for high school classes and summer camps, and like old adventure games, input is almost all text-based. It's pretty sophisticated, too. The parser has a decent knowledge of English parts of speech, so we can type something like "give Sprite to Ursula", and other sentence-like constructions, and each part is broken down and parsed. As previously stated, early adventure games sometimes were unforgiving, and if you phrased the command differently, it wouldn't work. The MOO parser supports aliases, partial names, and more that would give an adventure game a fit. We can even do something called "pronoun substitution", where a message is coded in such a way that it is customized to certain parameters. (ex. male players are referred to as him, females as her, verbs auto-conjugate for first/third person, etc.) Text-based adventure is still here, and has made great advancements since the days of Zork.

[Aslan of Narnia]

Some of them are really hard, and I prefer grapahical with typing over no graphics- with graphics you at least get a sense of what kind of commands you might use.

[hammerbach]

Remembering my 4.77 Mhz IBM PC with Seagate 20M hard drive, Hercules compatible monochrome graphics card, and 1200 baud (Who's yer Daddy) modem... Sigh... Zorked away many a night, and then there was the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Infocom text based game (still available last time I checked, so I bought it. Great game).

[Lightnin']

A while back, whilst playing Dark Ages of Camelot, I found out that my guildleader was Scott Adams (of text-adventure fame, not comic strip). I bitched him out about one of his adventures that caused me no end of annoyance- "touch" the button, not "push" the button. (Touching the button allowed you to move on, pushing it electrocuted you.)

He said, "Yeah, I get that a lot."

:)

[drachillix]

I played the hell out of Telengard, an old DOS dungeon/adventure game hmmm 1983ish. it was all keyboard but as I recall quite enjoyable.

[Spoons]

Originally posted by commasense
Just to gauge the ages here: anyone remember CP/M?Yes, I do. I worked for a place back in the early-1980s that was, like many computer companies at the time, designing and building its own proprietary hardware, proprietary software, and proprietary operating system. When they made the decision to implement a more-commonly-available operating system, it came down to a choice between DOS and CP/M-86. They chose CP/M-86, and were out of business a few years later.

Still, I well remember using it to do such things as "pip" files from here to there. :D

As for the OP, I'd have to agree with everybody else: you typed commands because there was no other way to enter them. I don't think we would have appreciated anything like making a menu choice; while I can't speak for anybody else here, I and my friends felt that being able to freely type a command and have the computer understand it* meant that we were only a little ways away from being able to converse with computers, as the science-fiction films and TV shows told us we one day would.

* Within the context of the game, of course. Recalling Zork, for example, commands like "take book," "north," and so on would be expected to be understood. We never tried anything like "contemplate meaning of life," or "plan rebellion" since it wouldn't have made much sense in the context of the game.

[S Puppy]

Originally posted by commasense
Just to gauge the ages here: anyone remember CP/M?

Sure, used it at work a bit up until about 5 years ago. At that
point it was only used to run a label printing program.

I don't remember his name but there was a guy in Georgia
I believe who wrote text games that had a self mapping
feature. A blank box on the screen would would have a line
drawn on it showing every path explored. It made for great
games.

[Derleth]

S Puppy: That sounds like the old UNIX game Rogue, which probably predates CP/M by a while. Of course, Rogue has since been ported to DOS and Linux and the *BSDs, so it's still eating clock cycles to this day. :)

Anyway, text-based games are a lot of fun. Coming from a text-oriented background, I prefer all-text with no graphics at all. In fact, I've downloaded the program frotz for Linux (frotz also exists for MS-Windows, and a close relative exists for the Mac, google for them), which is a Z-Machine emulator. As a result, I can play freely-available IFs (Interactive Fictions). I think IFs are much more entertaining than Doom or Quake, and certainly more intelligent.

[Who_me?]

Originally posted by drachillix
I played the hell out of Telengard, an old DOS dungeon/adventure game hmmm 1983ish. it was all keyboard but as I recall quite enjoyable.

I've never actually spoken to anyone else who remembered that game!! It was great!

Now listen youngsters...

We didn't have it on a floppy disk, we had it on a cassette tape. You stuck the tape in the tape drive, typed Load, and let it go at it. 45 minutes later it was loaded up and ready to go...

[Who_me?]

Okay, apparently I exagerated the loading time, it supposedly was only 15 minutes...

Hey, it was 20 years ago... :)

[micco]

Originally posted by RickJay
Boy, I think the OP has established himself as a youngster.

My first PC did not have a hard drive. It did not have a mouse. It had a color monitor that could display exactly four colors. It did not have a sound card of any kind. There was no modem or connectivity to the outside world of any sort. Of course, at that time, there was no Internet. Everything was text; they had not even invented a way to display different fonts on the screen. And that was just 17 years ago. There wasn't a web, but there was certainly an Internet, which has existed for about 30 years, long before the PC. And a color monitor! I remember when I thought a "color" monitor was one of those fancy monochrome jobs that had a button to allow you to cycle between white, green, and amber filters (not all at once mind you, but flip the switch to change the green text to amber when your eyes got fuzzy).

[Balance]

Originally posted by Who_me?
We didn't have it on a floppy disk, we had it on a cassette tape. You stuck the tape in the tape drive, typed Load, and let it go at it. 45 minutes later it was loaded up and ready to go...
You left out the part about fiddling with the volume control on the cassette deck for five minutes before it would even try to load.

[Khadaji]

Originally posted by Aslan2
No mouses invented then? :eek:

Thanks. LOL! Thanks for making me feel old! That was good for a smile this morning.

[IMightBeGiant]

Online text-adventures are still quite popular - just check out www.mudconnector.com and see all of the listings (1826 listings, right now)

I've tried out the graphic-based ones like EverQuest and a couple of others. I definitely prefer the text based ones. Familiarity, perhaps. Plus, I can put my client in the background and still do other surfing (uses almost no bandwidth to MUD)

It's come a long way from the 300 baud modem days... where you could read the text as it slowly ran across your screen. I can certainly say that the Zorks prepared the way. =) Never let your torch burn out!

[kabbes]

Bizarre coincidence. Just two weeks ago I dug out my old copies of LGOP and THHGTTG for the Atari ST. I never could be arsed to get through the catacombs in LGOP...

Remember that THHGTTG ended with a thinly veiled plug for the next game? Did they ever release that next game?

Aslan, I started off hooked on text adventures for the ZX Spectrum. That thing had 48k of memory, a cassette recorder to load games* (which made it all but impossible to save your game position), a 8-way digital joystick as its only interface other than keyboard and 8 colours that didn't work very well together. Graphical interfaces in adventure games were well, well beyond its capabilities.

OTOH we had games like Manic Miner.

No one I knew for years had come across anything like a PC. Such proto-PCs that did exist were no more powerful than the Spectrum.

It's worth remembering that when I started my job for a major international consultancy firm, they'd only given people desktop PCs less than 5 years earlier (sometimes a lot less). Everything previously had been done via mainframe. I'm only 26.

This is a rare example of a question that makes you feel old simply due to the assumptions that exist even to make the question even occur.

pan

*yes, complete with fiddly volume knob

[jk1245]

"You are standing in front of a white house"

The gaming world's equivalent of "Let there be light"

I remember that damn "Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy" games too. Nearly impossible in some areas.

[Cliffy]

Leather Goddesses ended with an even more thinly-veiled plug, kabbes; neither of them ever came out, not really. (Although once Activision bought the Infocom brand name, it released a graphical Leather Goddesses II, which I've never played, but I've heard poor things about.)

--Cliffy

[Trigonal Planar]

Anyone remember the old Commodore dial-up network? Using a 2400 baud modem! :)

I still have a brochure for that service around here somehwere.

[Larry Mudd]

commasense, I was using CP/M at home starting in 1984.

Remember AS/COM? (Popular terminal prog-- it was the first one I had that made use of that fancy-pants XMODEM file-transfer protocol.)

I also remember 'cheating' at text adventures by using a hex editor to locate the glossary. Helped me out of a few jams.

[Lamia]

Count me as another twentysomething suddenly feeling very old. I still remember the first time I saw a mouse at a computer store. I was amazed that you could move the pointer around on the screen with a flick of the wrist!

Originally posted by Nichol_storm
When I was in elementary school, we played this great adventure game where you got to be a princess on a quest for various magical artifacts and such. We'd hang over each other's shoulders and help the player direct the action. No one ever won this game, to my remembrance, but it was still fun.


Sounds like Sierra's King's Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella, an early favorite of mine and, if memory serves, the first color graphic game I ever played. Sure, it was only four or six colors on our CGA monitor, but I was impressed at the time. It was a great game though. I still have it in fact, but I dunno if it would run on my current machine.

Oh, those of you who mentioned Scott Adams...is he the one who did "Adventureland" and...uh...the pirate game? If so, I used to play those games in my computer class at the gifted center when I was in elementary school. We had these little black and white computers with screens about the size of your hand. Good times.

[Larry Mudd]

..only four or six colors on our CGA monitor...That's pretty generous. It was four colours-- if you count black and white. A CGA card expanded the pallete to include the mind-boggling additional choices of purple and pale blue.

Oh yeah, those were the days.

[hammerbach]

That would be "magenta" and "cyan", actually...

[John T. Conklin]

Originally posted by jk1245
"You are standing in front of a white house"

The gaming world's equivalent of "Let there be light"

Actually, it's:
West of House
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.
There is a small mailbox here.

>

The one thing I liked about Infocom games compared to much of the competition of the era (Scott Adams, etc.) was the richness of the text (which IMO described an environment that graphics based "adventures" have yet to match) and the parser allowed sentances far beyond the two word commands (go left, use match, etc.)For example:

Endless Stair
You are at the bottom of a seemingly endless stair, winding its way upward beyond your vision. An eerie light, coming from all around you, casts strange shadows on the walls. To the south is a dark and winding trail.
Your old friend, the brass lantern, is at your feet.

>get lantern and turn it on
Taken.

The lamp is now on.

>

[Derleth]

Originally posted by Mahaloth
Well, Xerox invented them in the '70's, but they weren't used widely until the Macintosh computer in 1984. And I believe the Apple Lisa actually had it earlier, but only by a year.

By the way, what OS did the PARC use to develop its first GUIs? 'Cause that would, by definition, be the first mouse-capable OS.

[Walloon]

Derleth, you may want to read my previous post above.

[Lamia]

Originally posted by Larry Mudd
That's pretty generous. It was four colours-- if you count black and white. A CGA card expanded the pallete to include the mind-boggling additional choices of purple and pale blue.


Ah, that's right, black, white, magenta, and cyan. My memory was confused by the way computer artists of the day could create the illusion of far more colors by skillfully placing (enormous) pixels of one color alongside another. Black and cyan -- why it's almost green! White and magenta -- clearly meant to be yellow! Or possibly pink, or pale brown!

[Terminus Est]

CGA allowed you to switch the palette between white/magenta/cyan and red/green/blue. Additionally, black was simply the default background color. You could switch the background to any one of sixteen (count 'em!) different colors.

[Padeye]

Kids these days. Harumph.

I've accepted my geezerdom and actually embrace it.

Back in the pliocene days when massive Chryslers roamed the earth no one had ever heard of a graphical user interface or a mouse. The first really useful home computers were CP/M machines with Intel 8080 processors and Motorila 6502 boxes like the Apple II and Commodore 64. They have very simple processors with total memory limts of 64 and 128k. Kilobytes, not megabytes. Not a lot of memory to handle complex things like graphics. The early Apple II computers didn't even have lower case text. EVERYTHING LOOKED LKE A CHAT ROOM NEWBIE SCREAMING!

The IBM PC had the potential for ten times the memory of the 8080 boxes but all the early software was waremed over CP/M stuff that ran in the 64k memory limit like WordStar. Games didn't give up such limitations until PCs started being shipped with 640k memory standard.

[NE Texan]

I think that a lot of people have pointed out the limited computer capability of the time as one of the reasons. Here's a different reason to add:

At the time, a certain amount of people working on text adventure games (particularly those from Infocom) were interested in the more general area of text parsers. (As one of the many investigations into AI, although as the bar keeps changing for what we call "AI", it can be harder to see that now). It was considered cutting edge and sophisticated to have a game that could understand english commands, and furthermore, accept more and more complexity in the commands.

The first games (especially the Scott Adams ones) might accept "Verb Noun", or, if you were lucky, "Verb [Adj] Noun". Later, it would understand compound sentences ("and"), questions ("What is..."), and prepositional phrases ("Take the cat of tongues out of the old bag").

It was only later, after the graphics improved on the machines, that the "cutting edge" games started going the other way, with graphical interfaces being the latest and greatest in games.

(Sniff. I miss those games. Time to look for my Infocom collection CD.)

[Max Torque]

> get no tea

no tea: Taken.

[lno]

And if people are interested in modern-day interactive fiction, the Ninth Annual Interactive Fiction Competition (http://www.ifcomp.org/) is taking place later this year. There's a broad spectrum of great to absolutely horrid games that are released completely free by the authors (including me. Does anyone else write IF here?). In my opinion, some of the games that have come out of the IFComp are superior to many of Infocom's offerings.