Escape rooms are still popular, gamebooks continue to pop up here and there, and role playing games are no longer the stuff of nerds (though they still are that too…) At such a time, it seems fitting to revive an old standard in the world of computer games: the Text Adventure game!

Like most things people remember fondly, text adventure games arose more from necessity than anything else. They came at a time when hardware was slow and expensive, and memory—specifically, for graphics, if any—was limited. Add to that, graphics for games were more difficult to create—especially for lower resolutions. So the high-end games were limited to those that had the resources to manage all those things. What was a lone person to do?

Enter the text adventure game—the electronic gamebook. True, they were typically much shorter than their printed counterparts, but they were much more interactive, and you could run them on basically any computer. You didn’t even need a display to play them: you could play them on a teletype. And if you wrote them in BASIC, they were portable. That last part is important, because BASIC was the true cross-platform language, and as it was essentially text-only, you got a lot of text-based games floating around.

The inspiration for my delving into this genre was a video of Strong Bad playing through Vampire’s Castle. I had never really been into text adventure games, though I had tried a few, but somehow watching this video, everything clicked. And I thought to myself, “I could make an engine for that.” So I did. I decided to make it browser based so people could play it without much effort, and I had been wanting to do try some web development for a while.

So, here’s the result:

There are two games at present: a more-or-less remake of Vampire’s Castle with a few fixes and a little flair. It’s the same size as the classic game and makes for a good one-run game. (Once you know what to do, you can beat it quite quickly.) It’s a fun game, and I really should disable the save game functionality to add a slight amount of difficulty—half the fun and almost all the frustration comes from having to start over when you fail. This game also has a ticking clock, so you’d better solve it fast!

The second game is STAR FRACAS 17—a space adventure game that is a lot bigger and more complex than I had originally intended. There is a long and complex item and event sequence, and I even added combat to the engine. The game is quite frustrating—a hallmark of the genre—but you can save and load any time, and I even included a map (mostly to see if I could implement one, but it comes in handy). If you’re a purist, you don’t have to use it, but it’s there if you want it. Otherwise, you’re going to do a lot of erasing on graph paper, because the rooms and their connections are not straightforward. (I used a spreadsheet to lay everything out, and there were a lot of non-square rooms.)

I hope you enjoy these games, and I hope I can find time to make more in the future!