History of adventure games: Text Adventures

In the early days of computer gaming computers didn't have the capacity for advanced graphics, therefore a story-driven game, like an adventure game had to be in text format.

The very first text adventure game is considered to be Colossal Cave Adventure (1976) for the PDP-10 mainframe created by Will Crowther when he was part of the development of the ARPANET.

PDP-10

Being an enthusiastic spelunker he loosely based the games cave on Mammoth Cave in Kentucky (The worlds largest cave).
The game was expanded in 1977 with the help of Don Woods who added new magical items and creatures, and thus changed the game into a loose fantasy world with elements of role playing games.
In the following years other programmers made other versions and ported the game for other platforms often changing the title somewhat. For instance Microsoft released Adventure in 1981 with its initial version of MS-DOS 1.0 as a launch title for the IBM PC.

Mammoth Cave

The game is still available in the BSD Games package that is included in some versions BSD and also available in the repositories of most Linux distributions with the title Adventure.

As impressive the game was for its time it did have quite some limitations. You where only able to write one or two word sentences, often following the structure verb + noun, and the game only read the first 5 letters of any typed word. Although you could navigate by typing directions such as north, east, south, west, etc, I found it really difficult to have an overview of where you where and what possible exits each location had. I suppose you really have to draw a map while playing to have any chance of beating it (but this was even long before finding the titular cave).

Adventure running on a HP 9845 Computer

The game is also featured in AMCs series Halt and Catch Fire and is available on the shows homepage complete with added hints:
http://www.amc.com/shows/halt-and-catch-fire/exclusives/colossal-cave-adventure

"What if there where some kind of technology which could enable you to talk straight to the imagination?
Well there is and its called Text, and it's been around for several thousand years." - Richard Bartle

Meanwhile in Cambridge Massachusetts 1977 Marc Blank and Dave Lebling started coding their own game inspired by Colossal Cave Adventure at MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science on the schools mainframe.
After founding Infocom in 1979 together with other staff and students at MIT, led by Lebling, Blank, Albert Vezala and Joel Berez, they started porting their game to microcomputers.
The game had to be split into three parts and was released as a trilogy.
Zork I: The Great Underground Empire was released in 1980 followed by Zork II: The Wizard of Frobozz in 1981 and Zork III: The Dungeon Master in 1982.
They chose the name Infocom to be generic, since at the time of founding the company they actually didn't know what the company would do. Two years later the companies first release was Zork I, and it was clear the company would deal with text adventures, or Interactive Fiction, which was the preferred definition at Infocom.

"This was for literate people, this was for people who Like to read" - Brian Moriarty

Zork being played on a Kaypro computer

Infocom wasn't the first company to develop adventure games for microcomputers.
Similarly inspired by Cave Adventure, in 1977, then an employee of Strömber & Carlson, Scott Adams began working on his own adventure game, written in BASIC for the TSR-80.
In 1978 he released his game Adventureland from the company Adveture International, which he founded together with his wife Alexis Adams in 1978.
This made Adventure International the first company to primarily sell computer games.
In Europe the Adventure International games where released by the company Adventure Soft established by Mike Woodroffe.

Adventureland on the TSR-80

Zork I was a popular game for the PC, thanks to the superior quality of its writing and packaging, in comparison to Adventure.
Many contemporary adventure games had a very limited vocabulary and often only allowed for one or two word sentences. Infocoms games where generally capable of much more complex sentences and puzzles where often possible to be solved in a number of ways, of course adding to replayability as well as minimizing the frustration so prevalent in other similar games. Try for instance Derelict (1982) for C64, and count the number of times your commands yield the answer WHAT? when the parser can't realize what it is you are trying to do.

Derelict (1982) Commodore 64

Text Adventure games are still popular today, although not commercially, with a lot of enthusiasts making their own, but now it is generally known as Interactive Fiction (IF).
There are a lot of editors for making your own IF without the need to be able to program.
Here are a handful of contemporary toolkits:

Inform
Quest
Adrift
TADS
Twine

"A Text Adventure is a little bit like playing D&D, but the DM is really stupid" - Dave Lebling

The next part of this series of articles can be found here:
http://nerdoutgaming.blogspot.se/2017/04/history-of-adventure-games-early.html