50 Years of Text GamesAaron Reed
50 Years of Text Games
by Aaron Reed
18mentions
13recommended by
14HN commenters
2021–2026first – last mentioned
93% recommend7% neutral
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…basically disappeared from computing history by the mid-1980s, as it stopped being even remotely practical as a distribution method. This article, by the way, is sort of bonus material from Aaron Reed's 50 Years of Text Games, which is phenomenally interesting if you're the sort interested in that corner of computing history. While many "text games" are parser-based like Infocom's text adventures, Reed also gets into Twine…
on “The Antagonists: The rise and fall of type-in text games” ↗I loved the recent newsletter-turned-book '50 Years of Text Games' by Aaron Reed. It's a bunch of deep dives into a bunch of games from throughout history, most of which I hadn't heard of. https://aareed.itch.io/50-years-of-text-games
on “From Infocom to 80 Days: An oral history of text games and interactive fiction” ↗50 Years of Text Games did a good piece on it: https://if50.substack.com/p/1976-adventure
on “Ken and Roberta Williams Working on Colossal Cave Adventure Remake for VR and PC” ↗Any discussion of text games puts me in mind of the amazing blog and forthcoming book, "50 Years of Text Games": https://if50.substack.com/ Highly recommended and target of a recent Kickstarter which blew through its reserve by well over an order of magnitude.
on “Ask HN: Great text based games to play?” ↗Still going strong as a niche. Lots of good tools nowadays. Why not give it a go? And coincidentally this book just released. I got the PDF version and am loving it: https://if50.textories.com/#buy
on “Atari VCS Myst “Demake”” ↗The Plains - Gerald Murnane [1] -- liked it a lot, poetic, sad and thought-provoking Tokyo Express - Seicho Matsumoto [2] -- very japanese crime story, liked it And my absolute delight: 50 Years of Text Games - Aaron A. Reed [3] -- I am just a sucker for everything text game/hypertext/interactive fiction. This book is amazing. [1] https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/1593668 [2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38588764-tokyo-express…
on “Ask HN: Any interesting books you have read lately?” ↗A good starting point for that would be http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp/gameprog.html#adv - or maybe, if you're interested in the prose more than the scaffolding, https://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/books/IFTheoryBook.pdf There's also the recently published "50 Years of Text Games" (https://if50.textories.com/)
on “Writing games the blog dedicated to text-based gaming” ↗You can read the [50 Years of Text Games](https://if50.substack.com/archive) newsletter that preceded the book. I highly recommend it!
on “Writing games the blog dedicated to text-based gaming” ↗I was introduced to this game, as well as many others, in the excellent book "50 years of text games": https://if50.textories.com/
on “The Sumerian Game: The Most Important Video Game You've Never Heard Of (2021)” ↗Have the printed version of the CRPG book. It's great. https://if50.textories.com/ is another really good one that dives into the early days of game design. The story around The Hobbit is a great example of emergent gameplay.
on “The CRPG Book Project (2023)” ↗Aaron Reed's 50 Years of Text Games[1][2] is a fantastic journey into the history and the possibilities of text-based games. I got the physical book and was surprised to find it as engaging as a novel. Each chapter takes one year between 1971 and 2020 and picks a game from that year to discuss in depth. While it might not help with the writing per se, you might good ideas there (several of the
on “How to program a text adventure in C” ↗This is probably a good place to mention a cool book, "50 Years of Text Games", at https://if50.textories.com/. Based on a blog series as I recall, but essentially takes a game from each year or so, to look at in detail for what was interesting at that time.
on “A 4k-Room Text Adventure Written by One Human in QBasic No AI” ↗also of note: the "fifty years of interactive fiction" post series: https://if50.substack.com/archive?sort=top (much discussed on hn) or in book form: https://if50.textories.com/
on “Adventure 751 (1980)” ↗from "50 Years of Text Games" - an excellent ongoing series of articles.
on “1982: The Hobbit” ↗50 Years of Text Games https://if50.substack.com/archive
on “Ask HN: Great text based games to play?” ↗