Java is not required to play these games, but there is a menu-driven interface and graphics.
Web-Adventures has a special page listing text adventure games especially good for children.Īdventure Games Live offers new adventure games you can play online for free. Text adventure games are good for developing children’s reading comprehension and imagination. The very first text adventure game from the late 1970’s, Colossal Cave Adventure, is available on this site. You can even play some of these games in a browser on mobile devices.
You don’t need to install any applets or plugins or enable JavaScript.
Web-Adventures allows you to play classic text adventure games online for free in your browser. We even found a documentary about the evolution of computer adventure games and some articles about the art and craft of developing the original text adventure games. There are also some free tools available for creating your own text adventure games.
We’ve collected some links to websites where you can download classic and new text adventure games or play them online. It’s like reading a good book and getting lost in the universe of the story, except you become the hero or heroine and affect the ending of the story. They can also simulate real life.Įven though computers can now handle intensely graphical games, playing text adventure games can still be fun. Interactive Fiction (IF) is actually a more accurate term for text adventure games, because these games can cover any topics, such as romances or comedies, not just adventures. Text adventure games are also referred to as “interactive fiction.” The games are interactive stories, so playing a text adventure game is like being part of a book in which you affect the story. These are play-by-email games played online.Before computers could handle graphical games, there were text adventure games. Supports editing the character set to allow for more advanced graphical capabilities than most text mode games.
Jonathan Partington and Jonathan Thackray for Topologikaĭan Baker, Alan Brown, Mark Hamilton and Derrick Shadel Nord and Bert Couldn't Make Head or Tail of ItĪ MUD, notable for its pioneering introduction of various innovations such as plotted quests, real estate, banking and distinct skills The only entirely non-graphical text adventure ever published by Electronic Arts Peter Jones and Trevor Lever for Melbourne House Ogden for Adventure Internationalĭouglas Adams and Steve Meretzky of Infocom Philip Mitchell and Veronika Megler of Beam Softwareīrian Howarth of Mysterious Adventures and Cliff J.
These are commercial interactive fiction games played offline. On personal computers Commercial text adventure games
Shakespearean adventure game originally hosted on Cambridge University's Phoenix mainframeĪdventure game originally hosted on Cambridge University's Phoenix mainframe released commercially by Topologika Software as Spy Snatcher Michael Toy, Glenn Wichman, and Ken Arnold Steve Tinney, Alex Shipp and Jon Thackray Jon Thackray, David Seal and Jonathan PartingtonĪdventure game originally hosted on Cambridge University's Phoenix mainframe Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels and Dave Lebling One of "many games" in library of 500 programs. (For purposes of this list, minicomputers are considered mainframes, in contrast to microcomputers, which are not.)įor the Dartmouth Time Sharing System. Often these games were continually modified and played as a succession of versions for years after their initial posting. Years listed are those in which early mainframe games and others are believed to have originally appeared.