TechStuff Tidbits: What was the first text-based adventure game?

games to new entries and established franchises. And that kind of inspired me. I started thinking about some of the computer games I really loved when I was a little kid. Now, y'all, I was born in the nineteen seventies. That means I grew up around the same time as the personal computer, right, because that became a thing in the seventies, And some of the games I played on our old Apple to e didn't have any sound or any graphics. All the imagery in the game existed only in text descriptions and

my imagination. So I am today talking about text based computer games. Now, if you've ever enjoyed a Choose your Own Adventure style book and I don't even know if those are still a thing now. I may still be dating myself, but if you've ever read one of those, you have a sense of what a text based computer game is like. The player of the game reads a description of an environment, which may or may not include hints of dangerous things that surround the player. The player

then types in a command. That command could be to walk in a specific direction, which will take you to a new location, assuming you can actually go that way. Or it might involve picking up something in the room or taking a closer look at some or it might involve trying to talk or battle someone or something in

the area, or maybe to hide from something. The tricky thing is the player will always come up with more options than the programmer considered or anticipated when they made the game, and that makes text based adventures sort of a puzzle that's on a meta level. The puzzle ends up being what did the programmer have in mind at this point in the game, Because you can get stuck

in these games. You could start to use what you think is every single potential option, but it's just that you haven't fallen on the one that the programmer had in mind. Thinking outside the box won't necessarily help you. The game can't accommodate creative answers that programmers didn't think about.

So with the old text based adventures, the programmer would have to lay out what is possible through code, and the code was pretty primitive, and the player would type in a command and the game would have to determine if the command made sense or not. If the command did make sense, well, then the player would get a result. That result might not be a positive one. It might end up being a you can't do that, because even though the command makes sense, something else has to happen first.

For example, if a door is locked, if the command didn't make sense at all, if the programmer had not thought to include that in the limited vocabulary of the game, well, the game would then have to tell the player that what they tried didn't work. And there were a lot of different ways that various text based games would inform players that what they were trying was a non starter.

You might get something like I don't understand what you're trying to do, or that won't work, or I don't think that helped, or I don't know what blank means, blank being whatever command you typed in that the game just can't handle. Those were pretty typical responses. Not all of them were used in every single game, but almost pretty much every text based game had some variation of that. Now, it might help if we think of a hypothetical example.

So let's say you've created a text based game in which the player starts in a room, and this room's just got It's a regular square room. There's a locked door to the north, there's a hallway to the west, there's a window to the south, and the east wall is blank. And maybe you've created some flavored text for the room, saying that the floor is stone and the walls are wood, and they are covered in healing wall paper,

and a dim chandelier hangs from the ceiling. You know, you give it some more text than just there's a door to the north and a hallway to the west and a window to the south. You want to create a mood, and that mood will depend upon the style of game you're making, right, So, if you're making a horror game, you wanted to be super creepy and atmospheric. If it's an adventure game, maybe it's mysterious that kind of thing. So you don't necessarily go bonkers with this description.

You don't want to write a full novel, but you want it to be interesting enough so that the player gets a sense of where they are and the style of game they're playing. So you try then to anticipate the sort of actions that your players are going to try when they start in this position. You want to anticipate enough of them so that you know for the vast majority of commands that are typed in, because that's how you interact with a tech based game. You have

a prompt where you type in your commands. You want those commands to get some sort of response and not just go straight to the default. I don't know what you're doing if you can help it, because you want to hook those players in and have them have a good experience. So you probably have thought about what the game should say if the player tries to open the lock door, so maybe it responds with the locked door won't budge, or maybe despite your valiant efforts, the door

remains locked. Maybe you also anticipate that some players will try to look out that window on the south wall, so you write something like the view outside the window is of an unremarkable lawn, A bit overgrown or something to that effect. Players can then choose to go to the west, which is walking into the hallway that will take them into a new setting, or maybe they want

to search the room. Maybe you write it so that that action searching the room uncovers a key that fits the door to the north, though I would argue that would be a bit too easy, that you probably should put the key somewhere else so that there's a little more gameplay there. But more likely you just decide that the flavor text is really just flavor. So let's say that your character searches the room and the response is

you find nothing useful, or something to that effect. The point is the responses that the player sees all come from the programmer. I know that should be obvious, but it's something that we have to keep in mind. Like every time we play a game, unless it's a weird glitch, the response we get when we do something was put there on purpose, right, Someone had to think about that

and build it into the game. So with text based adventures, everything you encounter has to have been put there intentionally or else there's a problem with the code. It could be that there was an error somewhere that breaks something. So if the programmer anticipates a specific action, they can write up a response that's appropriate or funny or whatever. But for everything else, the game is just going to present a standard default response like I don't know how

to do that, or whatever it may be. Anyone who has ever run a role playing game as a game master, you know what that is. It's physically impossible to anticipate everything players will do when you have a human who's acting as game master. Humans have the potential to run with wild player ideas, even if they had not planned for such a thing in the past. I used to as a teenager write adventures for my group of friends to play in games of Dungeons and Dragons. I'm sure

this comes as a shock to none of you. I didn't write professionally. These were just for my friends to play, and I would come up with these ideas and I would spend hours and hours and hours. I would remember, I'd get up early on a Saturday morning and just spend hours crafting adventures and dungeons, and I would have this whole kind of sequence playing out in my head of how this was going to go. But invariably at some point, a player or a couple of players would

come up with something that should certainly work. I just hadn't thought about it, and then I had to figure out what to do. And some of my favorite gaming sessions involved going completely off script because whatever the players had suggested was viable and we should do it, even though I had not anticipated it when I was crafting the adventure. Now some game masters are far less comfortable

winging it. Nothing wrong with that. It's an intimidating thing to try and keep track of everything if you're making stuff up on the fly, and so these game masters will sometimes hit a couple of tough choices, and neither of them are great. One of them would be to attempt to force the players toward a specific path, which makes them feel that they have no agency and that's not much fun. Or it involves outright denying them their ideas,

and that often can also create a less satisfying playing experience. Well. Unfortunately, text based games fall more into that restrictive style of play. For the most part, they might be very well designed, but they are still quite constrained. So game designers have to come up with lots of clever puzzles and interesting text to keep players engaged and eager to see the

adventure through to the end. And again, sometimes the puzzle is trying to make yourself think like the programmer was thinking when they made the game in the first place. It's not so much how can I get this door open? It's how would so and so have designed this so that I have to figure out a way to open this door? And it still becomes like a puzzle game, but it also becomes something like a psychological assessment of the person that wrote the game. It's a pretty interesting

style of play. But all of this had to get started somewhere, right, So what was the first text based adventure? Well, we're going to find out, but first let's take a quick break, all right, So who created the first text based adventure and what was it? Well, the game was called Colossal Cave Adventure and it was created by Will Crowther in the mid nineteen seventies. And this wasn't just

some hobbyist dipping his toe in programming. In the early nineteen seventies, Crowther worked for Bolt, Baroneck and Newman, also known as BBN. Now you might not be familiar with that company name, but BBN played a crucial role in the development of technologies that underpin the Internet, and indeed, Crowther himself was part of a small team working on arpaet, which was sort of a predecessor to the Internet. It's where a lot of the protocols and actual technologies that

allow the Internet to work were first developed. So here you have this pioneer of network computing plugging away at a major Department of Defense project, trying to design the tech that would allow computers to send data across vast networks. And in his spare time, he would game, and he would go spelunking, that is, he would go cave exploring. As for games, he was a tabletop D and D player Dungeons and Dragons, So that game first published in

nineteen seventy four, and Crowther became a fan pretty early on. Now, Crowther was married with kids, but his marriage was falling apart and he and his wife initiated a divorce. So in an effort to create something that would let him connect with his kids and make something fun for them and allow him to find ways to spend time with them, Crowther brought together his knowledge of programming, his love of exploration and caving and some elements of dungeons and dragons

to put together the Colossal Cave adventure game. So he chose a text based approach to make the game less intimidating to people who weren't familiar with computers. Remember this is before the personal computer age. Computers were pretty scarce for you know, most people never even encountered one. If they did, it was because they either worked in a research facility or they worked at a big company that happened to have like a mainframe computer as part of

its assets. But most people never even touched one. So how do you make a computer game approachable? That's why Crowther said, Let's make it a text based game. Players could type in commands in natural language and the program would check for words that matched viable options and then send a result to the player and update the story in the process. So Crowther's method was to allow for two word commands, so you could type something like go north or look huddle. It was primitive, but it was

easy to understand. You quickly got the rules. You knew you couldn't say look under the rock. You couldn't do that. You could say look rock and maybe get more information, but you had to keep it to those two word commands, and reportedly his kids really found the game interesting and fun to play. Crowther would actually release his game over arpinnet, which I think makes it the first shareware text based

adventure game. It wasn't long before computer scientists at places like Stanford got in touch with Crowther and asked permission to further develop and enhance the game, and Crowther agreed. They thought that was great fun, and so over time versions of the game popped up that could be played

on different types of computers. Because remember, at this time, people are using all sorts of different proprietary computers, each working under its own computer language and computer like operating system. So it would require recreating the game in many ways in order for it to run on other machines, and

that's exactly what various folks were doing. Originally these were big ol' honk and computer's house and research labs in university computer centers, but as the personal computer age dawned, we started to see versions for those machines as well, and often the game's title would simply be shortened down

to adventure. A few years ago, a guy named Eric S. Raymond uploaded the code for Colossal Cave Adventure with permission to get lab and now developers from all over the world can access the code and enhance it and look for ways to clean it up. And this is very similar to what the early programmers were doing in the nineteen seventies. It's still happening today in many ways. It's carrying on the trend that Crowther inspired. Now, there have

been tons of text based adventures over the years. I remember playing the Zorich series extensively, which ultimately expanded beyond text based adventures, but that's how they started. Then there was the amazing text game of the Hitchhiger's Guide to the Galaxy that includes some logic defying puzzles creating an improvable ability drive as a heck of a thing in

that game. But I did play it, and I ultimately beat that game, but not without I think I ended up having to consult tip lines or hints or something multiple times. I just could not suss my way through that game throughout the entire arc of the story. It is great, though some games had very cheeky titles. I will never forget the title The Leather Goddess of Phobos.

I never played it. I understand it was not quite as salacious as the title would have you believe, but I wouldn't know because I never I never got the guts to play that one. I remember playing The Hobbit and The Fellowship of the Ring, both in text. For them, they had like very primitive graphics associated with it, but they were like still images, kind of like a picture book. There are dozens of great titles from the seventies and eighties out there. A lot of them are available for

you to play via the internet. You can find links to web based versions of these text adventures if you want to play them. And they're also new text based adventures coming out even in recent years. So one I've heard of I have not yet played, is called Nighthouse. It came out in twenty sixteen, and others have come out since then, as well as visual novels. I think visual novels, which is now a popular genre of computer game, I think they owe a lot of their DNA to

the old text based adventures. So hats off to Will Crowther, a creator of the text based adventure game and say you you better turn on a light, it's getting dark. You are likely to be eaten by a group. Hope you're all well. I will talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.