The most popular text-based games

In the past, lots of games used ASCII characters (text) to represent the game world. These text-only video games may seem primitive and outdated and, in fact, the genre almost died with the fast evolving graphics of modern games.
A few genres traditionally linked to the beautiful world of ascii characters still survives: roguelikes (nethack, angband, etc.) and interactive fiction, for example.

Sort by:

Mind Mirror

DOS19863.6/5

Alice in Wonderland

DOS19893.3/5

Classic Hangman

DOS19833.6/5 Norland Software

Pac-girl

DOS19823.7/5 Magicom Multimedia

Moonmist

DOS19863.8/5 Infocom

Dungeon Master's Assistant Vol 2

DOS1989protected3.8/5 SSI Strategic Simulations Inc.

Questprobe featuring The Hulk

DOS19843.9/5 Adventure International

Myth

DOS19894.1/5 Magnetic Scrolls

Acquire

DOS19893.9/5 IBM

Essex

DOS19853.6/5 Synapse Software

Rawcopy

DOS19924.2/5

Spellbreaker

DOS19853.9/5 Infocom

Star Trek: The Promethean Prophecy

DOSMac OS19864/5 TRANS Fiction Systems

Arachne WWW

DOS1996freeware4.2/5

Arachne is a graphical web browser for DOS. Arachne was developed by Michal Polák and released in the early 1990s as a text-mode web browser with limited graphical capabilities. Arachne allowed DOS users to browse the World Wide Web in a graphical, though quite basic, manner. It supported features such as displaying images, handling lin...

Drug wars: a game based on the New York drug market

DOS19843.3/5

Adventure Game Studio (AGS)

WindowsLinuxMac OS1997freeware3.9/5

Adventure Game Studio (AGS) is a software development tool that enables users to create point-and-click adventure games. It was originally created by Chris Jones and has been used by game developers to produce a variety of 2D adventure games. AGS provides a scripting language, a visual editor, and various other tools to simplify the game developmen...

Magnetic Scrolls Collection

DOS19914.1/5 Magnetic Scrolls

Magnetic Scrolls was one of the finest developer companies dedicated to Interactive Fiction. The Magnetic Scrolls Collection is a trilogy of Magnenic Scrolls adventures remade using the Wonderland engine: Fish!, Corruption, The Guild of Thieves. The new window-based interface made text-adventuring easy even for gamers not used to a text-only interf...