There was a time, once, when games had no graphics; no sound; no windows;
nearly nothing at all ... but plot and characters. When games were event
trees, with multiple outcomes. You didn't need knee-jerk responses or
quick reflexes.. you some spare time, a keyboard, and some wit.
Okay; so they were often tedious..
But often brilliant adventures into worlds of variety untold, where one
could wander around for days or weeks, interacting with game creatures and
items, to attempt to figure out various puzzles. These games blazed a
glorious path into gamer hearts and left their mark for all eternity..
in MUDS and graphical adventure games.
Through "emulation", many of these truly great games survive even today.
Pick up some of this software, or go to the links section and find some of
the many more interpreters available and play these classics from the
past.. or even invent new games.
I used to play a lot of text adventures, most notably a slew of the Infocom games (Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy primarily), some Scott Adams games (like Pirate's Cove), and a Magnetic Scroll's game or two. The _MS_ games were plainly the best of the genre IMHO, incorporating static graphics, wonderful plots, and a decent parser. These games all need keeping alive... todays sock'em-box'em games just don't have the plot and fantastic imagination of text adventure games.
Updates Magnetic/X11 to version 0.07; relavent clip from the README:
0.07 Bugfix in fill_region(), in x11lib.c; caused good
Xservers to screw up on the repaint.
Hacked in some options to allow stdio usage of the
interp, and to turn off X11 usage.
Added MORE prompt to statusbar.
Magnetic/X11 (with small font selected)
Sources for Unix/X11 are available here (v.8)