The heroic age of text adventure games was dominated by Zork and Zorkalikes, many from the games studio Infocom; the text adventures' fortunes sagged when improvements in computer graphics lowered the average gamer's age, and then rose again when BBSes carved new spaces for text-based play.
The legacy of those games is the "interactive fiction" artform, which is largely practiced by programming in "Inform," a highly idiosyncratic programming language whose principal maintainer, Graham Nelson, is a deep thinker on the intersection of computing and art, and whose delightful essay (the transcript of a speech) on the history of Inform is an utterly captivating meditation on the way that code can be literature, and the role that artistic and technical choices have in the literary form of software.
- Read on boingboing.net/2018/10/01/code-is-text.html/amp
If this is a duplicate post, it only demonstrates my joy playing these games. I don't limit myself to the classics.
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