Sometimes it’s more like a text adventure Grand Theft Auto than a linear adventure game – the player can make Bilbo Baggins murder (or attempt to murder) key characters, drag around their corpses (if successful), and even become intoxicated on wood-elf wine (which alters the interface to a drunken slur in a stroke of comic genius). The game doesn’t exclude the possibility that the player will not want to play by the rules, allowing for commands such as ‘attack Gandalf’ (although, inevitably, this never ends well). Perhaps this is just the effect of being a gamer of today exploring a creation of yesterday.īut there’s also an undeniable sense of fun (and, yes, adventure) in the game – unlike RPG successors to the text adventure, there’s a feeling of true choice in every action. The gameplay itself is often equally frustrating – Thorin consistently complains, the objective is incredibly unclear and death results in immediately being sent back to the beginning of the game. Indeed, some may say it’s a little too faithful, complete with excruciating ZX Spectrum loading times. It’s safe to say it’s a faithful rendition of the original game. Long before Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy appeared on screen, Middle Earth was introduced to gamers in The Hobbit – a text adventure for the ZX Spectrum. One of the most notable titles that can be played online is the 1982 game The Hobbit, based, of course, on J.R.R Tolkien’s fantasy novel, restored through Java. As is the case with a surprising number of retro games, many offer something genuinely entertaining, and, ironically, seem new and fresh. Text adventures aren’t excluded from this phenomenon – dozens of classic titles can be found online. In the 1980s, Super Mario Bros could only be played through purchase or bootleg (or perhaps a visit to a friend’s), whereas today, a quick google search will bring up thousands upon thousands of flash and emulator versions of the original title, ready to be played at the click of a button. With programs and plugins like Adobe Flash and Unity becoming standard issue for most browsers, and the popularity of emulators growing by the day, the internet is no stranger to the revival of classic gaming titles. The question is, of course, why? Who continues to produce these seemingly defunct interactive stories? What appeal continues to be held within these fascinating time-wasters? And what lies ahead for a medium that is thought to have died long ago? Reliving the Glory Days: Classic Adventures Whilst it’s true that this particular breed of video game has likely vanished from the face of commercial titles forever, it lives on – and in many cases thrives – in the form of free, browser-based games.
In fact, to claim that text adventures are entirely dead and gone would be to ignore two very special things: the age of the internet, and the creativity inherent in the production of a text adventure.
#Text adventure full#
After all, why read a chunk of text when you can see the dungeon in all it’s technicolour glory before you? Why go through the tedious process of typing ‘examine object’, when you can simply click the visual representation of said object? It’s hardly surprising the genre died out: to play a text adventure in today’s world of Skyrim and Portal would be like playing a dusty game of checkers in a room full of arcade machines… wouldn’t it? Now: Vibrant, vivid, huge, The Witcher 3 shows just how far we’ve come since the 1980s. It wasn’t long before the text adventure faded into obscurity, then obsoleteness. As the field of games development became increasingly advanced, text adventures were produced less and less, creators beginning to favour platformers, fighting games, and – the truest successor to the text adventure – the point-and-click. Kind of like a technologically advanced Fighting Fantasy gamebook. As the name suggests, the interface in these games consisted primarily of nothing more than words – the player would read to get an idea of their surroundings, then type simple commands to interact with the game world. Once upon a time, in a world without diverse colour palettes, without Sony’s Playstation or WASD controls, there existed the video game in what was essentially its most basic form: the text adventure. The Text Adventure: Relic of Gaming History, or Timeless Medium?
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