Where Have all the Text Adventures Gone?

There are a lot of complaints and discussion about today’s shallow games that concentrate merely on packaging (graphics&sounds) and hardly at all on content. When old-time gamers read through such discussions, they necessarily look back and think of how things used to be and may even remember a specific game genre that focused mainly on content.

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.

If the above description sounds familiar to you, you probably started playing computer games in the early 1980s or even before. You will also probably have fond memories of such Infocom game titles as Zork, Planetfall, Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and perhaps even the Leather Goddesses of Phobos. To a modern gamer, most of these titles say nothing at all and the game genre that they represent, text adventures, says even less. Therefore, it should be interesting to look back at a time when games still had more content than eye-candy.