A text adventure describes a place in words and waits for you to type what to do next. GO NORTH moves you. GET LAMP picks the lamp up. The game answers in prose, and the world it describes exists only in the text and in your head. The form began on university mainframes in the 1970s, and for a few years in the 1980s it was one of the best-selling kinds of home computer game. In Britain it was also the one genre whose players could easily write their own: with a £14.95 tape, hundreds of them did, and sold the results.
Fast facts
- First game: Adventure, by Will Crowther (1975–76), expanded by Don Woods (1977).
- First on home computers: Scott Adams’s Adventureland, for the 16K TRS-80.
- American leader: Infocom, makers of Zork.
- British houses: Level 9, Melbourne House (The Hobbit), Magnetic Scrolls.
- Tools for amateurs: The Quill (1983), Graphic Adventure Creator, PAW (1987).
- Later name: interactive fiction.
Adventure
The first text adventure was written by Will Crowther, a programmer and caver, during 1975 and 1976, and set in a cave modelled on part of the Mammoth Cave system in Kentucky. In 1977 Don Woods, at Stanford, expanded it into the version that spread from one mainframe to the next. It was written in FORTRAN for the DEC PDP-10 and needed about 300K of memory.
Its opening set the pattern for everything that followed. A later version for the Commodore PET, abridged by Jim Butterfield, began: “Somewhere nearby is colossal cave, where others have found fortunes in treasure, though it is rumoured that some who enter are never seen again. Magic is said to work in the cave. I will be your eyes and hands. Direct me with commands of 1 or 2 words.” It warned that it only read the first five letters of each word, so “northeast” had to be typed as NE.
Scott Adams and the micro
Adventure needed a mainframe. Scott Adams, a systems programmer at Stromberg Carlson, played it for almost ten days of early mornings and late evenings until he reached the full 350 points. “Yet it seemed unfair that such a fascinating game was restricted to such an expensive machine,” he wrote in BYTE in December 1980. He owned a TRS-80 with 16K, and the FORTRAN version he had played took about 300K.
His answer was an interpreter. Instead of writing each game as a program, he wrote one program that could play any adventure stored as compact data, and wrote the adventures as data. After six months of play-testing, Adventureland went on sale through The Software Exchange and Creative Computing Software. His wife Alexis then came up with the idea for Pirate’s Adventure (copyright 1978), in which you had a mission, to build a pirate ship, instead of simply collecting treasure. By 1980 his games ran in machine code on the Apple II, TRS-80 and Exidy Sorcerer. The split between an interpreter and a game database became the standard way to fit adventures into small machines, and The Quill later used it too.
Zork and Infocom
At MIT, Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels and Dave Lebling wrote Zork for a PDP-10, where it grew until it strained “even the megabyte address space of that machine”, Lebling wrote in the same issue of BYTE. To bring it to microcomputers, they split it into parts and ran it on a “Zork-language virtual machine”, with an interpreter for each computer: by late 1980 there were interpreters for the Apple II, PDP-11, PDP-10 and TRS-80. The virtual machine’s instruction for moving an object from one room to another took three bytes. The first part was sold on floppy disk by Personal Software and produced by the authors’ company, Infocom. The virtual machine is now known as the Z-machine.
What set Zork apart was its parser. It understood a vocabulary of over 600 words, including 100 verbs, and sentences as complicated as “Put all of the books but the green one under the rug”. Lebling called such games “computerized fantasy simulations” and “a new art form: the computerized storybook. Instead of reading the story, you play it.”
Infocom made a virtue of having no pictures. One of its advertisements, quoted in a 1984 British book on adventure games, claimed “We draw our graphics from the limitless imagery of your imagination”. By the mid-1980s Infocom was selling its games in Britain, through Activision, as “interactive fiction”.
Parsers
The parser is the part of the game that reads what you type. Most early adventures, on both sides of the Atlantic, used two words: a verb and a noun. The Quill read the first four letters of each word. Longer sentences cost memory that the games needed for rooms and text.
The alternative arrived in Britain with The Hobbit, from Melbourne House, for the 48K Spectrum at £14.95 with a copy of Tolkien’s book in the box. Computer & Video Games reported in January 1983 that its characters could interact and communicate “not only with the player but also with the other characters”. Its parser, which Melbourne House called Inglish, accepted chains of commands such as SAY GANDALF “READ SIGN”, GO N, UNLOCK DOOR, ENTER DOOR.
Not everyone was convinced. Tim Gilberts of Gilsoft, who published The Quill, told Sinclair User in 1985 that complex parsers “can actually limit communication”, leaving players hunting for the one phrase a character would respond to, and that The Hobbit’s Inglish could be “quite quixotic and difficult to fathom”. His own company’s next system, PAW, had a full sentence parser all the same.
The British scene
In Britain the genre had its own press. CRASH started Derek Brewster’s “Adventure Trail” column in May 1984, with its own adventure chart. Your Sinclair took on Mike Gerrard as its adventure writer in May 1986. The charts show how long adventures sold. In September 1986 CRASH’s Adventure Top 30, which also counted arcade adventures, had Heavy on the Magick at number 1 and The Hobbit, nearly four years old, at number 7.
Level 9 was the longest-running British adventure house. Started in 1981 by the brothers Mike, Nick and Pete Austin, it released Colossal Adventure in 1982, advertised as “a complete, full size version of the classic mainframe game”, and was writing for the Spectrum from 1983, with Snowball and Lords of Time. By 1988 the brothers ran it from four terraced houses in Bracknell. Magnetic Scrolls, a newer company, published its first game, The Pawn, through Rainbird. ZZAP!64 gave the Commodore 64 version a Sizzler in December 1986, for “both visual and imaginative clarity”, and its reviewer had “never been so impressed by a company’s first product”.
Writing your own
The genre’s other British story is the amateur. Writing a fast adventure had meant writing machine code until Gilsoft published Graeme Yeandle’s The Quill for the Spectrum in late 1983. You typed in rooms, words, objects and rules, and The Quill saved them as a machine-code game that ran on its own. Gilsoft asked no royalty on games written with it. By April 1985 Sinclair User reported that “amateurs and small one-horse companies now churn out truckloads of games written with its aid”, and publishers such as Melbourne House and Firebird were selling Quill-written games. A count on the ZX-Database, reported in 2022, found 531 Spectrum games made with The Quill and 510 with its successor, PAW.
Many of those games were sold by mail order and reviewed in the adventure columns beside commercial releases. Fergus McNeill of Delta 4 began with The Quill and turned to parodies of the genre, such as Bored of the Rings. By 1988 ACE was advising amateur authors that they could not afford advertising, that a trade had grown up through fanzines such as Probe, and that their packaging should be “the best that you can afford”.
Decline
At the end of the 1980s the market for text adventures shrank. In May 1989 ACE noted that Infocom had “published almost nothing” since 1987, while role-playing games such as Ultima and The Bard’s Tale made large profits. “Maybe the old text adventures should just lie down and die,” it wrote. In the same issue Level 9 said it was building an “animated adventure system” for a role-playing game. Activision, which had bought Infocom, closed its Cambridge studio in 1989, and ACE reported the closure in October 1990. By the time Edge looked back in 2004, it judged that “in the commercial sense, the text adventure was dead as the ’90s rolled in”, as players and publishers turned to graphical adventures.
Interactive fiction
The form carried on without the commercial market. Players on Usenet kept writing games, and in the 1990s the programmer Graham Nelson wrote Inform, a language for making games in Infocom’s style that compile for the Z-machine. Nelson described the form as “a narrative at war with a crossword puzzle”. In 1995, shortly after Inform appeared, readers of the newsgroup rec.arts.int-fiction started an annual Interactive Fiction Competition for short games. Twelve were entered in the first year.
The older tools have come back too. In Spain, Tim Gilberts’s DAAD system, written for Aventuras AD in the late 1980s, has been released for public use and extended for modern machines. The ZX Spectrum Next ships with a full copy of PAW and an interpreter for Infocom’s games, and new text adventures for 8-bit machines are still reviewed in print.
Sources
- Dennis G. Jerz, “Somewhere Nearby is Colossal Cave: Examining Will Crowther’s Original ‘Adventure’ in Code and in Kentucky”, Digital Humanities Quarterly 1.2, 2007 (web, secondary): dates of Crowther’s and Woods’s versions, and the Kentucky cave. https://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/1/2/000009/000009.html
- Peter Gerrard, Exploring Adventures on the Commodore 64 (Duckworth, 1983), pp. 2–5: Crowther and Woods, the PDP-10, FORTRAN and 300K; the opening of Jim Butterfield’s PET version.
- Scott Adams, “Pirate’s Adventure”, BYTE vol. 5 no. 12, December 1980, pp. 192 onward: Adams’s history, the interpreter, Adventureland and Pirate’s Adventure.
- P. David Lebling, “Zork and the Future of Computerized Fantasy Simulations”, BYTE vol. 5 no. 12, December 1980, pp. 172 onward: the authors, the PDP-10 original, the Zork-language virtual machine, the parser and vocabulary.
- A. J. Bradbury, Adventure Games for the Commodore 64 (Granada, 1984), chapter 1: Infocom’s advertisement; the Inglish example command.
- 8000 Plus, November 1986: Infocom’s “interactive fiction”, distributed in the UK by Activision.
- Computer & Video Games issue 15, January 1983: The Hobbit (48K Spectrum, £14.95, book included).
- Richard Price, “Fantastic landscapes”, Sinclair User issue 37, April 1985, pp. 68–69: Quill-written games and Tim Gilberts on parsers.
- Sinclair User issue 41, August 1985: Subsunk, produced by Firebird and written with The Quill.
- CRASH issue 4, May 1984: the first Adventure Trail column and chart; Level 9 advertisement (Colossal Adventure).
- Your Sinclair issue 50, February 1990: issue index recording “Mike Gerrard joins YS” in issue 5, May 1986.
- CRASH issue 32, September 1986: Adventure Top 30 chart.
- “Level Heads”, CRASH issue 49, February 1988, pp. 45–46: Level 9’s history and releases, and the Austin brothers in Bracknell.
- ZZAP!64 issue 20, December 1986: The Pawn (Rainbird/Magnetic Scrolls).
- ACE issue 9, June 1988: Fergus McNeill and the fanzine market.
- ACE issue 20, May 1989: Infocom’s output, “lie down and die”, and Level 9’s role-playing system.
- ACE issue 37, October 1990: Mediagenic’s closure of Infocom.
- Computer Gaming World issue 88, November 1991, and Retro Gamer issue 10, 2004: Infocom histories dating the Cambridge studio’s closure to 1989.
- Edge issue 142, November 2004: the commercial end of the text adventure, Inform and Graham Nelson.
- Retro Gamer issue 9, 2004: interview with Stephen Granade on the Interactive Fiction Competition.
- Alessandro Grussu, Spectrumpedia, volume 1 (English edition), p. 242: ZX-Database counts of games made with The Quill and PAW.
- Tim Gilberts, “Adventure Trail”, Next Magazine issues 5 (December 2024) and 7 (March 2025): PAW, DAAD and the Z-machine interpreter on the ZX Spectrum Next; Inform as a way to make Z-machine games.
Explore the game
Our Adventure game study follows a cave expedition into parsers, world state, puzzle design and the pleasure of working things out.
Try building a small one with the reusable two-word parser, including an editable vocabulary and a complete Spectrum BASIC adventure.