The Rise of Computer Games, Part I: Adventure

https://technicshistory.com/2025/12/13/the-rise-of-computer-games-part-i-adventure/

by cfmcdonald • 7 months ago

136 76 7 months ago

reactordev• 7 months ago

Some fantastic text adventures can still be had online. There are MUDs (my favorite), Roguelikes, Sims, and even cyberpunk adventures. A half dozen Star Wars ones as well.

This was peak 1986. A few years later and we’d be jumping a little pixel plumber on cathode ray tubes.

Can’t wait for the next part…

ktallett• 7 months ago

Text adventures whilst sometimes infuriating, if played as they are meant to be back when released with a piece of graph paper to help map out where you have been and where you go, there is still some magic about them that isn't had with graphical games. Every room becomes exciting which just isn't the case even in my favourite games such as Fallout New Vegas. Oh more bottle caps again in a drawer but I can begin to tell what rooms will be essential to look in and which won't buy the middle of the game. There is none of that in text games, you just have to explore and get truly lost, another thing that is much harder to do nowadays.

glimshe5• 7 months ago

One of my dream games is a truly open world text adventure. I got a glimpse of it by having ChatGPT run this game, but it started hallucinating and misremembering after a few rounds. It has to be perfect to avoid breaking the immersion, but I'd pay $100 for such a game even without graphics.

hackshack• 7 months ago

You're on to something. I tried this too, a few months ago, with offline Ollama/Magistral on Mac. "You're a dungeonmaster for a single player adventure game, with me as the player..."

It lost track of things almost immediately. But the foundation was there.

Maybe if we had a MUD-tuned model...

If it has an approximate way to track state, and a "pre-caching" method where it can internally generate an entire town all at once, room by room, so hallucinations are rarer... actually starts to sound like a traditional DM's method of world building for a campaign.

Maybe something like an LLM-assisted Inform (interactive fiction engine). https://ganelson.github.io/inform-website/

Side note: been playing Aesir, then the Aesir 2 MUD since 1994. It's still up!

c22• 7 months ago

Maybe you could ask an LLM to build a campaign then ask another one to run it.

TylerLives• 7 months ago

Instead of relying on the model's memory alone, you could have it read/write to a file.

alisonatwork4• 7 months ago

Isn't this what MUDs are? I tried a few in the early days of the internet and even back then they were like much bigger and more dynamic versions of text adventures of the 80s. For me I bounced off the idea that I had to role-play with other humans - I thought it was far more interesting to chat with other humans about real-world topics - but if you are looking for a large, text-based role-play experience then it's probably worth trying out a few. There might even be some that can be soloed these days, there are so many.

I think the challenge of trying to make an "endless" game using an LLM is the same challenge that all procgen games face - they are boring for people who are seeking a well-paced narrative. There are players who enjoy the mechanics of looting/crafting/trading/etc who will gladly play games where the story is incidental or emergent, but if you're specifically looking for something with a bit more narrative depth, I'm not sure procgen will ever work. Even if there is a system that tries to project coherent storylines onto the generated world, you still need the player to do things that fit into a storyline (and not break the world in such a way that it undermines the storyline!), otherwise the pacing will be off. But if the system forces the player into a storyline, then it breaks the illusion that the world was ever truly open. So you can't have it both ways - either there is a narrative arc that the player submits to, or the player is building their own narrative inside a sandbox.

AAA games try to have it both ways, of course, but it's always pretty clear when you are walking through procgen locations and leafing through stacks of irrelevant lore vs when you are playing a bespoke storyline mission that meaningfully progresses the state of the world.

shevy-java2• 7 months ago

chat with other humans about real-world topics

You can do this with regard to a MUD too, but typically out of character and not every MUD would allow OOC chatting within the game world, as that is disruptive to those players who seek immersion.

It seems to me as if you may not have found a good roleplaying MUD back when you played MUDs. You may be missing out on that experience. I retired from playing MUDs about 11 years ago permanently, but the in-world roleplay was the only thing that was interesting to me since it was the creation of a unique storyline potentially involving many other playercharacters.

JKCalhoun3• 7 months ago

What I wanted in MUDs was a simple editor to allow people with little technical skill a means to create a world—or extend an existing one. And then I wanted a way to join MUDs together—like if you leave a forest by a certain path you are, unbeknownst to you, rerouted to a different MUD that picks up where the forest left off.

In this way I imagined in time a world larger and richer than any that had come before it—where you could really just keep going, keep playing, never see all of it.

glimshe5• 7 months ago

MUDs are a low-tech version of what I'm describing. It relies on other people being available and generally leverages the usual tropes with repetitive killing-based gameplay.

LLMs are limited today, but one day they may be able to provide the well-paced narrative you're talking about. The LLM would be a skilled fiction writer that would introduce interesting events as I explore the world.

If I decide to go to a bar and talk to random strangers, it could give me interesting life stories to listen without any action. But, suddenly, a mysterious man walks in, gives me a sealed envelope and departs without saying a word... What is in the envelope?

miki123211• 7 months ago

It is my understanding that muds (and all the flavors of Mush in particular) can sort-of do it, by letting players create their own story through roleplay, supported by an extremely open (and often player-modifiable) world, as well as good admins / GMs.

That is more like "computer tabletop", however, and doesn't scale beyond a small number of players.

mynjin• 7 months ago

Would Avalon count?

https://www.avalon-rpg.com/intro/mud

glimshe5• 7 months ago

I've never played Avalon but it looks like a better text adventure. I'm not talking about hardcoded or randomized worlds, but truly reactive worlds.

In my experiment with ChatGPT, I was walking around in a museum (that was the scenario) and decided to flirt with a woman who happened to be there. The flirting was something I decided to do on the spot with no prompting from the AI. The woman had just been part of the room description up to that point. But it reacted to this new situation in a semi-realistic way, essentially creating a new "adventure" on the spot. I met her on the next day, brought a gift (and so did she), but then it started hallucinating... :(

thom• 7 months ago

Would D&D not work for you?

glimshe5• 7 months ago

It did for a long time, but depending on busy friends makes it so I can't play this whenever I want. My "dream" game is a single-player game I can play as many times I want without having to rely on others.

itomato2• 7 months ago

I wonder how a book of type-in AI prompts would do…

nottorp3• 7 months ago

... with generative "AI" being nondeterministic, it will be a different experience for every "player".

Sometimes it will even match what the prompt author intended.

itomato2• 7 months ago

Yes, the fun of variability between LLMs is part of the appeal.

Typing isn’t even required any more, but as a book of templates, there are more possibilities than the average LLM user can conceive of in the moment.

griffzhowl• 7 months ago

There was a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy text adventure, with writing from Douglas Adams. It's entertaining, but insane what you have to figure out to get the babel fish...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_th...

stevekemp• 7 months ago

There's a good three-part writeup starting here, covering Douglas and the game:

https://www.filfre.net/2013/11/douglas-adams/

For my money the "best" adventure game was and is The Hobbit, but that may well be because it's the first one I was haunted by.

Similar two-part writeup starts here :

https://www.filfre.net/2012/11/the-hobbit/

glimshe5• 7 months ago

The Hobbit had randomness and emergent gameplay in ways that even Infocom didn't quite reproduce. A classic.

WillAdams• 7 months ago

For a fascinating insight into "The Colossal Cave Adventure" see the Literate Program version of the source:

http://literateprogramming.com/adventure.pdf

cmos• 7 months ago

I loved this game. I want to make it into a mud.

shevy-java2• 7 months ago

I guess nowadays nobody would want to play e. g. King's Quest and what not, but in the 1980s or so that was novel and creative. Today the games tend to have powerful 3D engines, but the creativity was lost for the most part. Sometimes there is still innovation (Little Nightmares brought something new to the table, for instance) and of course the graphics and sounds are great, but something is gone now. In part this may be me getting older, but in part I also think that the whole computer game segment got much more boring over time.

shmerl• 7 months ago

People play such games today too.

JKCalhoun3• 7 months ago

When the first-person shooter arrived, somehow we collectively decided that's what all games should now be.

I think we've learned that creativity comes from constraints. Early computing platforms certainly were replete with that.

egypturnash2• 7 months ago

I've never been into Doom clones (to use the term from back in the day) and yet I have enjoyed playing countless video games from about 1984 through to the present. Very few of them are first-person games, whether they're head-clickers or other forms of first-person gaming.

Apocryphon5• 7 months ago

Adventure games became FPS as early as 1992 (only one year before DOOM, so maybe I'm not making much of a point here) with the coming of Ultima Underworld.

finaard• 7 months ago

Almost none of the FPS shooters try to to something creative, though. Duke Nukem 3D is still unbeaten for fun in multiplayer (and we still get it out now and then for that) with simple gimmicks like the holo duke, pipe bombs and laser mines.

Even just looking at "game uses 3D engine" we don't really have many great things. There's portal, and while some of the other stuff have promising ideas (like infinifactory), for all of them the controls tend to get in the way of fun.

For ease of use and fun pretty much all simulations - even as far back as the 90s - just using isometric projection are still unbeaten by attempts to go full 3D.

maccard2• 7 months ago

Here’s the highest rated games on PS5, Xbox and switch this year. There is _one_ first person shooter in the top ten of all three of these lists combined

[0] https://www.metacritic.com/browse/game/ps5/all/current-year/... [1] https://www.metacritic.com/browse/game/xbox-series-x/all/cur... [2] https://www.metacritic.com/browse/game/all/all/current-year/...

alisonatwork4• 7 months ago

I agree that mainstream games tend to feel more predictable in their mechanics than what we got in the 8-bit era, but I'm not sure that that means they're more boring. There were a lot of crap games that came out in the old days that only seemed interesting at the time because our access was so limited. Nowadays anyone can play thousands of games for free, on pretty much any device, so they can choose to spend their time in the kinds of games that they actually prefer.

I'm not sure it's worth lamenting that the most popular games today tend to have addictive mechanics and otherwise little novelty. Clearly that's what people enjoy. If you are interested in experimental or avant garde games, then that stuff is still out there in the indie scene. Lots of them are bad games, but they still might be good ideas.

There's plenty of examples I am sure people can share on the thread, but here's one that comes to mind for me as interesting but not very fun: Bokida - Heartfelt Reunion. It's a gigantic monochromatic world with impenetrable puzzles and weird geometry that reminded me of those old freescape games like Driller. I don't think I enjoyed it very much but somehow I did play it all the way through and it still sticks in my mind today because no other game I played really did the same stuff. But, then, it's possible that that's just my subjective experience and for someone who plays Minecraft or something similar, Bokida was just derivative and forgettable? I dunno.

There's a lot out there, though. I think we're in a golden age of games! As a kid I could never have imagined having a literal "backlog" of dozens of games I've already bought but not even started yet because there's so much to play.

vunderba• 7 months ago

It's less mainstream, but there are still a lot of good adventure games released in the indie scene. The Crimson Diamond released last year got a lot of good press and is a text parser + graphical adventure game with an EGA style palette.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crimson_Diamond

Gormo• 7 months ago

The Crimson Diamond is unique in that it's deliberately trying to evoke a very specific era and platform: late '80s, Sierra SCI engine. It's particularly inspired by The Colonel's Bequest. That's why it uses EGA-style graphics and parser input.

But adventure gaming never went away, it just became more and more of a niche. There are lots of high-quality amateur games, but there's been a steady tricky of high-quality "indie" commercial games since the '90s. I'd recommend Wadjet Eye Games' entire catalog: https://wadjeteyegames.com/games/

ido4• 7 months ago

I think it's mostly that you're no longer interested in computer games and as such aren't aware of what's currently available. IMO there has never been a bigger and more varied supply of good games as there are today, in pretty much every genre (my personal taste is mostly for small indie games, not AAA). I started playing computer games in the late 1980s myself and have never stopped.

Tuna-Fish2• 7 months ago

100% agreed. The golden age of gaming is right now, Kickstarter and Steam have opened up the field to smaller studios in a way that has never happened before.

The biggest, most advertised titles are often very good-looking and very "bubblegum", for the exact same reason that the most popular genres of pop are like they are. To appeal to the widest audience, you have to file off all the sharp corners, and if that's the market you see then modern games can seem soulless.

But that's not all of the market! No matter what genre you are interested in, there's probably more work ongoing in it and better games coming out right now that there ever has been in history. Most of them are less refined and sell a lot less than the mainstream games, but occasionally one succeeds well enough to expand past the small niche audience, which inevitably brings a lot more people into the niche, followed by imitators which grow the niche.

fragmede• 7 months ago

Monkey Island. The difficulty of the first game and the difficulty of the last game. The last game was still a game, but the challenge wasn't there. It just wasn't there. We might as well just be playing Progress Quest.

mancerayder3• 7 months ago

Is that true? While there's a much larger overall volume of content out there, many many games to choose from... Don't you see a pattern around first person shooters, real life 'simulators' built on repetitive OCD grind, and a general sense of sameness?

Nothing feels really novel. Where the innovation is seems to focus on graphical realism, which of course I love.

I'm strongly attached to Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 and while I'm near the end of the game, I'm dragging my feet so I don't have to go back to the drawing board of sorting through endless terrible FPS and retro hack and slash games on Steam that don't interest me and are copies of 20 year old games.

Adventure games (the topic here) are my favorite though, and it's very rare that anything comes out. The Sierra and LucasArts days are over (RIP). That said a few gems come out here and there, like Lucy Dreaming.

Apocryphon5• 7 months ago

All games involve some kind of exploration, but I’m talking about something like Myst, the long-ago graphic adventures by LucasArts and Interplay, where the whole central mechanic of the game was basically “click on everything everywhere.” Today, those games can feel hilariously primitive, and they were probably always pretty boring for the vast majority of people who didn’t start playing videogames until they got an iPhone. But there’s a serenity to Myst that you can’t really find in any major videogame today. It’s videogame Tarkovsky, really: The whole point of the game is experiencing the quiet, looking at everything. So Myst is boring, but only in the way Tarkovsky and Russian novels are boring. (The problem isn’t that they’re slow. The problem is that the world has made you too fast.)

- Darren Franich, "Metal Gear Solid: The strangest great videogame franchise"

https://ew.com/article/2015/09/04/metal-gear-solid-strangest...

k__• 7 months ago

Terraria and Stardew Valley show that it isn't just about graphics.

maccard2• 7 months ago

If this is your view of modern gaming, I think it’s you that has changed. This year alone my play list has been - blue prince, hollow knight: silksong, Ball X pit, split fiction, clair obscur, monster hunter wilds, arc raiders, helldivers 2 (came to Xbox, so this one is a stretch), nightrein, Indiana jones, dispatch… That’s on top of the “big” hitter that are still very fun experiences.

jgalt212• 7 months ago

Play was central to the formation of personal computer culture.

In his book, Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World, Steven Johnson applies this thesis to pretty much all the things. Enjoyable book, but the thesis probably does not hold up too much scrutiny.

anthk5• 7 months ago

For Spanish speakers there, there's "Aventura.z5" at IFDB, you can play it with a Frotz interpreter. It's 99% close to the original modulo some odd wordplay. The backstory and all it's the same, with the Mammoth Cave descriptions with the slaves and the like.

christkv• 7 months ago

I think the most annoying thing of a lot of modern games is the whole crafting thing that is bolted onto everything. But there are some real gems out there for old school gamers. I loved Baldurs Gate 3, Divinity 2, Expedition 33 and Disco Elysium for example as really fun and interesting CRPG's. It's just that the cost of taking a risk these days is to high for studios and most kids are playing "free" games for most of their time. So even though the market is big it feels like the "growth" is mostly in the "free" games part of the market which is terrible.

turkishmonky• 7 months ago

I fondly remember playing games typed out from books and magazines when I was younger - although I usually tricked my little brother into typing out the game so we could both play it.

Jokes on me though, since now he can type at over 100 wpm (and uses dvorak)

sizzzzlerz• 7 months ago

I'd just begun my first professional engineering job after college. The company I was working for had a mainframe computer on which there was a copy of Adventure. When I discovered the game, there were a number of late nights playing it. One night, long after everyone had gone home, I was playing in my office with the lights off. The only light was from the green phosphorous monitor I was using. All of a sudden, I stumbled into the breath-taking view room with its erupting volcano. The words describing the scene filled the screen with descriptive prose that simply glowed in the dark room. The effect was mesmerizing. Forty-seven years later, I've never forgotten that.

xtiansimon• 7 months ago

Interesting.

I recently investigated text based adventure games in Python as a possible tool to teach and evaluate outdoor wilderness safety knowledge and awareness (backpacking and overnight camping) for wilderness therapy.

While doing the research I recalled a friend showing me a text adventure game on his i386 PC. I could not understand the appeal. The possibilities the game suggested were vast, but the effective actions were unattainable--I was not able to see even the most basic level of progress before I became bored.

Now, outlining the wilderness safety "game", its obvious to me some understanding of software and programming would have made the game accessible. Then maybe a key in a room would be better understood as a metaphor of the code. In other words, a game at text level can be an attempt to model a complicated problem in an interactive program. If you can write a game where the final product is convincing (suspend disbelief), then maybe the game's model can be useful for other things. In my case instruction and evaluation of basic domain knowledge. And this level of programming awareness is useful in not getting bored (or experiencing cognitive gap between what a text implies and what the game can deliver).

g023• 7 months ago

Something about the modern day fails to match the feelings of when MUDs were in their prime. With text you can describe so much more than a picture can paint. You can visualize a smell, a taste, or a feeling in text, but it doesn't translate well when you have graphics painting your imagination for you.

The Rise of Computer Games, Part I: Adventure

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