For this reason, Interactive Fiction adventures definitely feel more like a “game,” however the player has more agency in each action that is taken and the consequences typically feel more like they are a natural result of your choice of actions. If you were to capture the text stream while you played, and printed it onto the pages of a book, it would read like the most stiff and mechanical novel you’ve ever written. Sometimes solutions involve a very bizarre combination of objects or action that was probably the result of an inside joke by the game designer. This can lead to frustration with players who can’t figure out what to do next.

Interactive Fiction usually has puzzles that need to be solved to unlock new objects or quests. Some plot elements are also time sensitive, so if you take too long exploring your open world, you could fail in your quest. Plot elements in these stories are triggered when you do something, like pick up an object, unlock a door, or talk to a person. Later, this technology would evolve into the Lucas Arts style graphic adventure game where instead of having to memorize and type commands, you could simply point and click the actions and objects. The iconic example of this type of game is “Zork” developed by Infocom. “Walk North” “Take Dagger” “Talk to Bob” etc. You have a library of commands you need to know in order to navigate your world. Interactive Fiction (aka IF) games are essentially “open-world” adventures where you are told a brief description of your location, any objects or people nearby, and then prompted to enter combinations of verbs and objects to take action. But as I quickly discovered there are two major approaches to creating text adventure games, each with distinct roots. There are a LOT of free tools now, hooray for technology. What if I wanted to get back to my roots? What if I just wanted to write a simple adventure game and publish it myself. We both absolutely love the challenge of creating modern adventure games with our current technology, but it got me thinking. I now work as a game director at Deck Nine Games and work on adventure games as well, including Life is Strange: Before the Storm. Since our modest days in 1984, Joe now runs his own game studio called Fire Maple Games and has created popular mobile adventure games such as “ The Secret of Grisly Manor”. They are immersive and so much fun to play, but also costs millions of dollars to create with teams of hundreds of people. Modern adventure games are in HD resolution with incredibly realistic animated characters, dazzling special effects, and complicated interwoven plots that take hours to complete, and dozens more to explore thoroughly. Without an engine to start with, every option was hand-coded in Basic and we quickly burned through our 128k of RAM. When I was 12, my best friend Joe Kauffman and I started to write simple text adventures on his Macintosh for fun. Myself and Joe sitting around his Classic Mac.

Best free text adventure apps