Interactive Fiction

You know, many years ago, before the ages of 486s, Pentiums and all of that magnificent graphically enhanced computer sets, there was the old computer, running on MS-DOS, one in which graphics were hard to program, and computer users had to rely on something called their "imagination" (gasp!).  They didn't have graphics to illustrate a majority of things (and if they were, they were the size of what you would call Windows icons nowadays).

Text was very easy to display in older programming languages (as it is today), and thus became the core method of displaying worlds.  This is where the term interactive fiction jumps into the mix.  Almost like playing a novel, you controlled your actions in those worlds by typing actual commands like take sword or open mailbox (as you can see from the picture on the right).

The most popular of those games was the Zork series, filled with humor, puzzles to make you pull out your hair, and treasure-hunting to end the game.  Ah, those olden days.  There were many of these types of games in the early days of shareware, such as Beyond the Titanic, and some even tried to put role-playing elements into them.  The creator of Zork, a company by the name of Infocom, also created a slew of other interactive fiction games, such as The Lurking Horror or even Leather Goddess of Phobos (hubba-hubba!).

Interactive fiction still has a small but dedicated following.  Many of the games that were released many years ago can be played on the internet; one site that you can play most of the older ones is Play Infocom Adventures Online, which also includes the interactive fiction version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

If you're interested in programming your own interactive fiction, try the Inform 7 programming language that is incredible in that you create the game based on sentences constructed in English, rather than various commands used in conventional programming languages.

I had an interactive fiction feature about half done in Inform 7, and really should get to finishing that up some time in the near future.