Aslan2, be careful with those games, or you are likely to be eaten by a grue.
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:.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.”
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.
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. 
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.
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.
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.
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…
Okay, apparently I exagerated the loading time, it supposedly was only 15 minutes…
Hey, it was 20 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).
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.
LOL! Thanks for making me feel old! That was good for a smile this morning.
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!
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
“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.