Adam Cadre’s Photopia is often cited as a classic work of contemporary interactive fiction. It’s literate, emotive and lingers in the memory long after it draws to a close. Surely an experience no gamer would dare forfeit? There’s just one problem: the game is presented to the player in the form of the written word.

It’s always interesting to observe the aftermath when a Photopia recommendation is lobbed into the youthful crowds that gather on popular gaming sites. Destructoid were this month’s mettlesome matadors, bravely red-flagging the game as part of their ongoing Indie Nation series. The results were disappointingly predictable, with the first wave of comment bombing offering the likes of “boring as hell”, “too tedious” and “I can’t handle this shit.” Cooler heads prevailed once the more patient readers were able to devote a little more time to the experience, but the damage had already been done. A very clear (if slightly illiterate) message had been sent to old school gamers: kids today don’t be wanting no text in they’s games.

An exaggeration, perhaps. Modern games haven’t abandoned text completely—as fans of The World Ends with You and Professor Layton and the Curious Village will testify—but it’s certainly true to say that video games exist on an evolutionary path that picks off textual elements as soon as technology allows. Where we once endured screen after endless screen of agonizing dialogue to further a game’s narrative, we now endure agonizing voice acting instead. Likewise, where a low-resolution mess of monochromatic pixels necessitated the use of on-screen descriptions to explain what we were supposed to be seeing, we now shell out hundreds of bucks on the latest ATI and NVIDIA video cards for the privilege of experiencing photorealistic 3D environments.  That old adage about a picture being worth a thousand words would be right at home in the contemporary gaming scene.

When a game like Photopia comes along and forces the gamer to climb back down that evolutionary ladder, we can understand why they might begrudge the experience. The text adventure genre throws an extra wrench in the machine: not only is player presented with a game world in the form of prose, their only means of interacting with this world is by typing text when prompted to do so. The sucker punch? You have to use a very limited vocabulary—one that often delves into an unfamiliar glossary—in a somewhat stilted, unnatural syntax.

I can see your raised hackles from here, text adventure fans, but you know it’s true. It can be frustrating when a game refuses to acknowledge your input in a way that seem logical. In a modern game, you’d walk up to the desk, press a single button on your gamepad and—bingo!—you’ve searched the drawer and retrieved the secret documents inside. In a text adventure that same process could span half-a-dozen inputs, even more if you’re having to guess obscure verbs and nouns. A case of apples and oranges, perhaps, but that’s kind of the point. Expecting modern gamers to instantly be at ease with a text adventure is a bit like asking a generation of moviegoers weened on The Matrix and Lord of the Rings to watch Modern Times—complete with jerky frame rates, subtitled caption cards and plinky-plonk piano—and damn well enjoy it. One or two will get a kick out of it, but most will find it a drag.

While text-based games have died a long, lingering death over the years, we’ve gained much from their loss. It’s hard to imagine a gaming scene without the likes of Shadow of the Collosus, Okami, BioShock and STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl—games defined as much by their audio and visual aesthetics than anything else. It would, however, be unfair to complete dismiss the text-heavy games of yesteryear. While they were dominated by the text adventure genre, let’s not forget some of the other wordy gaming experiences that are all too uncommon these days:

System 15000

• Developer: AVS
• Publisher: Craig Communications
• Released: 1984
• Platform(s): C64, ZX Spectrum
• Closest modern descendant: Uplink

If War Games gave kids of the 80s an appetite for computer hacking—plus the delightful prospect of instigating World War III from the comfort of your bedroom—then the likes of System 15000 certainly helped satiate it.

A somewhat clumsy friends of yours managed to have all his money stolen by evil online people. Naturally, you’re a l33t hax0r, so you’re tasked with retrieving this money. The game simulates a computer terminal, which you use to dial into woefully insecure computer systems, hunting for breadcrumbs amidst the inform you find in order to further your quest. I assume the game was set ten years in the future, given that the virtual BBS networks didn’t take five minutes to display a line of text.

Text-based hacking games quickly faded into obscurity. Activision’s Hacker series is the most fondly remembered contribution to the genre, even though the main bulk of its gameplay concerned robots, surveillance cameras and videotape recorders rather than ANSI-based tomfoolery. It wasn’t until Introversion’s Uplink, published in 2001, that old-school gamers could delight in ye olde hacking once more.

The Fourth Protocol

• Developer: Electric Pencil Company
• Publisher: Hutchinson Computer Publishing
• Released: 1985
• Platform(s): ZX Spectrum, C64, Amstrad CPC
• Closest modern descendant: KGB/Conspiracy

Life without the Cold War scarcely bears thinking about. I mean, there’d be no Rocky IV, no Top Gun and no 2010: Odyssey Two for starters. A chilling thought. More importantly, though, half the video games made in the 1980s would no longer exist. In some cases this wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing, but it would also mean having to say a tearful farewell to the likes of Raid Over Moscow, Balance of Power and—hastily getting to the point—The Fourth Protocol.

Based on Frederick Forsyth’s novel of the same name, The Fourth Protocol spearheaded what I like to call the “action office” genre—a whole breed of game that managed to build up a surprisingly eventful narrative by doing little more than simulating a very untidy desk. Never had the world of manila folders, rotary dial telephones and coffee-stained address books been so much fun.

Like System 15000 before it, the game’s instruction manual (i.e., the cassette box’s inlay) gave you a single telephone number and pretty much left you to it. Not for the 8-bit era the elaborate tutorials we get today, as exciting as a whole ten minute segment on sharpening your HB pencil might have been. There were three episodic mini-games to tackle: the first two required you to intercept a Russian spy and discover the whereabouts of a suitcase nuke, whereas the final episode replaced the office environment with a text adventure as you coordinated an SAS team’s attempt to disarm the weapon.

Action office games are a little on the thin side these days. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney would be a fair comparison, even if there’s more emphasis on dialogue than one’s filing cabinet. But for the whole Cold War theme alone I’ll recommend KGB (or Conspiracy, as the CD-ROM version was renamed by its publisher, probably through fear of discovering their Corn Flakes dusted in anthrax), even if it does date back 1992.

Killed Until Dead

• Developer: Artech
• Publisher: Accolade
• Released: 1986
• Platform(s): C64, ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC
• Closest modern descendant: Agatha Christie: Evil Under the Sun

Action office games have rarely been as much fun as Artech’s witty take on the board game Cluedo.

Following in the grand tradition of many an Agatha Christie novel, a number of diverse individuals are improbably gathered at the location of an imminent murder. It’s your job to determine the would-be killer and victim, as well as the weapon, location and motive. To aid you in your quest, your desk gives you access to character biographies, providing you with enough leverage to begin interrogating them. Thanks to the power of the 1980s, you were also given access to a videotape recorder that could be used to surreptitiously record revealing conversations between characters. The trivia-based elements of the gameplay may be better suited to fans of detective films and novels, but a bit of educated guesswork will work just as well.

Killed Until Dead succeeds because it’s so much fun to play. The writing is sharp and witty, the graphics colourful and cartoon-like, with a decent soundtrack thrown in for good measure. On top of all that, the game has about two dozen different plots, so it’ll take some time to bleed the game dry.

Classic whodunnits come and go in the world of video games, but the genre’s currently represented by the more than adequate Agatha Christie: Evil Under the Sun. It doesn’t have its tongue quite so deeply lodged in its cheek as Killed Until Dead, but should give virtual sleuths more than their money’s worth.

Alter Ego

• Developer: Peter J. Favaro
• Publisher: Activision
• Released: 1986
• Platform(s): C64, Apple II, MS DOS, Mac OS
• Closest modern descendant: The Sims

Well, gosh. A computer game developed by a qualified psychologist. Activision made a pretty big deal of hammering this point home in the various commercials and on the game’s packaging. Not that they needed to, because Alter Ego just so happened to be an excellent game.

As the title may suggest, Alter Ego gave players the opportunity to turn back the clock and play “what if?” with their lives. Starting at birth and continuing through to old age (although there were numerous opportunities to meet a premature demise), the game presented you with an ongoing sequence of everyday scenarios then asked you to make a choice as to how to respond or proceed. How you chose to respond would shape your alter ego’s personality.

Those of us brave enough to swap notes in the school playground discovered that we all invariably ended up the equivalent of psychopathic, jobless, 40 year-old virgins who would eventually die cold and alone. Thankfully, we’re now at a point where these predictions turned out to be unfounded—well, for most of us—so I suspect Alter Ego may very well have been Favaro’s attempt to seek revenge on the kid who shoved snowballs down his back in second grade. Those scars run deep.

The Sims is as close as it gets in the modern age, although there’s still a wide chasm between them. Whereas Alter Ego is very much about a very personal psychological experience, The Sims isn’t much more than a virtual doll’s house, albeit one that allows you to conduct no end of sadistically surreal experiments on your dolls.

Tracksuit Manager

• Developer: J. Foster
• Publisher: Goliath Games
• Released: 1988
• Platform(s): C64, ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, Amiga, Atari ST
• Closest modern descendant: Football Manager 2008

While football management games were two a penny back in the 80s, Tracksuit Manager kicked convention in the shins by presenting each game in the form of a running commentary. No more feeble, pixelated abstractions of match highlights; a continuously scrolling ream of text described every throw-in, every knee-crunching tackle and every forceful nasal ejection of phlegm in minute detail.

It worked beautifully. Not only did it capture the drama of an unfolding match in a way that no other football management game had managed to achieve, it also afforded managers the opportunity to directly observe the effects of their chosen strategies. I.e., if Bryan Robson’s hamstring injury flared up for the umpteenth time that season, you’d see it affect his ability to complete passes, giving you a clear indication who you needed to send to an early bath.

Watching hundreds of games unfold in real time wouldn’t have been much fun, so you were given the ability to adjust the speed of the scrolling text and thus control the length of each game. Exhibition matches against Belgium would rush by in mere seconds, but come an important World Cup qualifier you’d be in real time mode, glued to the last five minutes of the second half, gripping your joystick in fear as England’s beleaguered defence attempted to hold on to its 1-0 lead. Certainly an experience that very few contemporary football titles have adequately emulated.

A Mind Forever Voyaging

• Developer: Infocom
• Publisher: Activision
• Released: 1985
• Platform(s): Amiga, Apple II, Atari ST, C128, MS-DOS, Mac OS
• Closest modern descendant: None

While technically a text adventure, A Mind Forever Voyaging transcends the genre in so many ways it would be more fitting to describe it as a sociopolitical simulation with a sci-fi twist.

The player assumes the role of PRISM, the pinnacle of artificial intelligence technology, tasked to evaluate an audacious social reform plan. The vast bulk of the game’s content unfolds within a virtual facsimile of a city in South Dakota, where PRISM adopts the identity of an average citizen. There’s a long list of menial tasks that need to be carried out, all of which are used to assess the subtle effects of the proposed plan.

Yeah, you knew something bad was going to happen. As PRISM returns to the simulation at 10 year epochs, he witnesses the collapse of society as the plan goes awry. In the real world, PRISM’s creator has little choice but to condemn the plan, but the senator responsible for drafting it has other ideas. To say much more would ruin one of the most dramatic and tense climaxes ever experienced in a computer game.

Ironically, despite A Mind Forever Voyaging’s difficulty level being tagged “Advanced”, it was one of only a few Infocom adventures that I managed to complete back in the 80s. (The others including the likes of Wishbringer and Moonmist.) I’m not entirely sure why, although I suspect it’s because the experience felt more akin to reading a novel than playing a game, so I probably approached it with a different mindset.

While the other games listed here have very obvious modern descendants, trying to pick out something that even holds a candle to A Mind Forever Voyaging is practically impossible. Deus Ex and Half-Life 2 feature similar dystopian futures—with the former throwing in that extra conspiracy theory element—but wrap them up in a completely different form of gameplay. Portal offers some similarly foreboding “rat in a screwed up maze” ambience, but things are very much different outside that maze. Republic: The Revolution, at least on paper, promised to offer something with political bite, but clunky gameplay mechanics diluted the experience.

We’re unlikely to see the likes of A Mind Forever Voyaging again, at least in its original form. There’s so much potential wrapped up in a 3D first-person iteration of the game, although I suspect it would take a braver publisher than most to consider something so far outside the traditional FPS box.

Traditional interactive fiction aside, what other text-based games did you enjoy back in the day?