What text mode games were out there ? A few come to mind immediately : Wizardry in its beginnings, along with others like it. But some games admitted a minimal amount of "interactivity" that went beyond just reading something, then typing an answer (hey, I'm not downplaying the experience, okay ?). One of these text-mode games was a little fantasy adventure game where reading was limited to the name of the creature you happened to encounter. It was called 10Rogue and it looked like this :
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It was actually a Diablo-like (way before Diablo), where you went through the levels killing eveything you dared and getting stronger and richer in the process (or dying - tsk, tsk). It was unlimited in that new levels were computed on the fly, and got larger and harder with time. You could save your character and watch him get better. |
It was not real-time, though, since creatures only moved when the user pressed a cursor key. So we can say it was turn-based. Nonetheless, it incorporated the notion of experience levels, magic, swordplay, range weapons and treasure (go here for a short trip down Memory Lane).
Another basic game of that time was Grime, an arcade game that placed the user in command of a magnet, with the challenge of avoiding being surrounded by metal filings falling from the top of the screen. Each type of in-game element was visualized by a specific character, which was very readable. Movements were controlled by the cursor keys. Grime was an improvement over 10Rogue in that it was not tied to user action for something to happen. Technologically, it was therefore more advanced, since it had to monitor the keyboard actively and not just wait for input.
These games were extremely basic and could not incorporate very much as far as variety is concerned. But they made for handy tools when it came down to wasting half an hour or so. They also were a signal of times as early text mode games (or is it beginner programmers ?) did not know how to scan the keyboard correctly (10Rogue), thus real-time keyboard input came later in the evolutionary scale (Grime). This emulated the technical growth of the gaming industry as a whole, going from garage or bedroom companies with one employee doing game development on spare time, to full-blown 100-employee international companies with whole departments devoted to a single aspect of the complicated games of today.
Text mode games did not disappear with the advent of more powerful computers. They just changed style a bit. As graphical screens were stealing the day for adventure/fantasy and arcade games, text games migrated more and more to brain teasers of various sorts. Go-Moku has a text-based version written in Turbo Pascal that is quite functional and just as good as any full-3D version could do. Of course, you have to accept the pure mental challenge and not be bothered with the bleak screen.
Obviously, text-based games are not developed any more (on PCs). At least, not that I know of. But graphical capabilities were sparse at the beginning, up to (I risk a guess) at least until 1987, when IBM put the VGA card on the market and Tetris appeared from deep freeze (aka Red County).
Now we can take a look at games in 2D.