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 These text-only video games may seem primitive and outdated and, in fact, the genre almost died with the fast evolving graphics of modern games.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.

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Wall Street Raider

DOS19864.3/5

Earthly delights

DOS19843.6/5 Datamost

FreeDOS Shell

DOS2002freeware3.5/5

Jewels of Darkness

DOS19864.2/5 Level 9 Computing

Caves of Thor

DOS19893.4/5 Apogee Software

Hacker 2: The Doomsday Papers

DOS19863.7/5 Activision

Hacker II: The Doomsday Papers is a video computer game developed by Steve Cartwright and published by Activision. It was released in 1986 and is a sequel to the original Hacker game. The game was available for various home computer systems of the time, including the Apple II, Commodore 64, and MS-DOS.In Hacker II: The Doomsday Papers, players take...

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

DOS19843.3/5

Scapeghost

DOS19893.7/5 Level 9 Computing

Trinity

DOS19864.1/5 Infocom

Core War Plus

DOS19843.9/5

Demon's Tomb: The Awakening

DOS19893.3/5 Silhouette Software

Doszip Commander

DOS2007freeware3.9/5

Beast

DOS19843.8/5

Questprobe featuring The Hulk

DOS19843.9/5 Adventure International

Air Traffic Controller

DOS19854.2/5 Cascoly Software

Math Cad 2.5

DOS19894.3/5

Cutthroats

DOS19843.4/5 Infocom

Ballyhoo

DOS19863.5/5 Infocom

2112

DOS19943/5

Microsoft Diagnostics 3.01

DOS19943.7/5 Microsoft

Larn

DOS1986freeware3.9/5

Skullduggery: Adventures in Horror

DOS19863.4/5

Borland Reflex 2.0

DOS19863.7/5 Borland Software Corporation

Borland Reflex was a relational database management system (RDBMS) developed by Borland International, a software company that was prominent in the 1980s and 1990s. Reflex was released in the mid-1980s as a graphical database software primarily targeted at business and professional users.