Gather ’round, kids, and listen to my tale of the computer games of years gone by. Those without any kind of newfangled “graphics” or flashy “UI.” If you had a Commodore 64 or Apple when you were ...

It’s easy to dismiss text adventures as the relics of a bygone age. They served a purpose when art and animation were too memory-intensive for the computers of the day. They were popular with a ...

Jason Scott's first documentary in 2005 was about bulletin board systems (BBSs), which were in a sense the PC world's parallel evolution of the early Internet. This documentary, really more a ...

Open iPhone. Go to App Store. Download Frotz. The classic text adventures from Infocom made us all learn the shortest possible way to write responses, and this brevity of input seems perfectly suited ...

We've seen people turn neural networks to almost everything from drafting pickup lines to a new Harry Potter chapter, but it turns out classic text adventure games may be one of the best fits for AI ...

Indie games are often noted for their simplistic graphics, but Plotkin’s game goes one step further: It has no graphical interface at all. Players explore a crashed starship, solve puzzles, and guide ...

Long before computer animation and virtual reality, people were creating virtual worlds in a more traditional way: text. And some of the most vibrant and complete virtual worlds existed in a quirky ...

James Introcaso, one of the designers of the Dungeons & Dragons adventure Waterdeep: Dragon Heist, got the conversation started with a post on his Worldbuilder blog titled ‘We Can Do Better Than Boxed ...

I admit it. I used to type swear words into text adventure games. A lot of the time I wanted to see what replies the author has reserved for potty-mouthed players. It would usually be something like ...