Talk not text: a new adventure begins
In 1976, some people found themselves standing at the end of a road before a small brick building, surrounded by a forest, pondering “What next?” They would enter the building, get a lamp and some keys before going down, down and south in order to unlock a grate.
Eventually, they would start to explore a series of colossal caves, performing various actions they’d unlikely get away with today such as throwing an axe at a dwarf (and having a second attempt if they missed). But such was the joy of Will Crowther’s highly influential game, Adventure – the first of its kind ever written.
Also known as Colossal Games Adventure, this classic for the PDP-10 mainframe computer was tackled by typing words such as “get keys”, “go down” and, perhaps a little less obviously, “say Plover”. Hugely popular, it led to the development of similar titles such as Infocom’s Zork, Beam Software’s The Hobbit and Electronic Arts’ Amnesia, before text adventures largely became a niche pursuit, with point-and-click adventures becoming the natural progression.
Today, text adventures feel like a novelty, a throwback to more innocent times, even though they remain loved as interactive fiction. Among the developers inspired by them were Philip and Andrew Oliver. They created a budget game called in 1987, which saw an
