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?
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)?
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.
No mouses invented then? :eek:
Thanks.
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.
Well, Xerox invented them in the '70’s, but they weren’t used widely until the Macintosh computer in 1984.
[insert ruefully shaking head smiley here]
Kids these days.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Text adventures, A.K.A interactive fiction, are alive and well and still being written.
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!)
The computer mouse was invented by Douglas Engelbart in 1964, and he filed for a patent in 1967.
The first mass-produced personal computer with a mouse (or for that matter, clickable icons) was the Apple Lisa, in 1983. The Lisa was a failure, but the mouse reappeared the following year on the first Apple Macintosh.
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?
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
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!
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?