Text Adventures: Like Watching Paint Dry
Hardcore gamers between 1979 to 1985 weren’t fortunate enough to lap in the luxury of the games we have today. Back then computers were only capable of around 8 KB – 16 KB so the type of games they played were called text adventures, like Zork, and the idea was simply to control a character around the screen via key commands. It’s like the horse and buggy before the car; Laborious and stinky.
Jason Scott, a Boston filmmaker and Unix system administrator is producing a documentary text adventure film aptly titled Get Lamp about the pioneers of the game era. He also made another documentary called BBS: The Documentary, which is of course about the solitary network Bulletin Board System just before we had this thing called the internet. Even though I’m just pushing 31, I do recall text adventures and BBS’s on the Commodore 64. These films would make an interesting comparison of the technologies we have today, and how far we’ve gone. I need to check these out.
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I still play text games. Interactive Fiction as the kids call it these days.
I find it kind of soothing to play, much like reading a book.
Ahh the old school days of gaming pre-Vic20.
My favorite was the Star Trek game we used to play on our old DEC mainframe back in school.
It doesn’t interest me really. It really is like watching paint dry. I need more stimulation!