The best 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 These text-only video games may seem primitive and outdated and, in fact, the genre almost died with the fast evolving graphics of modern games.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.
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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Moria
DOS1992freeware
Zyll
DOS1984 IBM
Released in 1984, Zyll is what happens when a Dungeons & Dragons dungeon master learns to code and decides to build a text adventure inside a coffee machine. There are no graphics - just glorious walls of text - but boy, is it...
Business Simulator
DOS1987 Reality Development
Do you find spreadsheets thrilling? Does the idea of profit margins make your heart race? Then Business Simulator is your kind of party. It’s all about running a faceless company in the most unglamorous way possible—bu...
Borland Turbo Pascal 3.0
DOS1986 Borland Software Corporation
Suspended
DOS1983 Infocom
James Bond 007: A View to a Kill
DOS1985 Angelsoft
Empire: Wargame of the Century
DOS1987 Northwest Software
Baseball Mogul
Windows XP/98/951997 Infinite Monkey Systems
Baseball Mogul (1997) was the original release that kicked off the whole franchise. Developed by Clay Dreslough and published by Infinite Monkey Systems, this was a pioneer in the world of sports management sims. It was released f...
Star Saga: Two - The Clathran Menace
DOS1989 Masterplay Publishing Corporation
Executive Suite
DOS1982 Armonk Corporation
Warp Rogue
Windows 10/11Linux2004freeware
Core War Plus
DOS1984
Monopoly (Adam Stevens)
DOS1998
Doszip Commander
DOS2007freeware
DeskMate
DOS1984
Deskmate is a software suite developed by Tandy Corporation that provided a graphical user interface (GUI) and a set of applications for personal computers. It was often bundled with Tandy's TRS-80 and Tandy 1000 series of compute...
Mission: Mainframe
DOS1987
Romantic encounters at the dome
DOS1988 MicroIllusions
Rules of Engagement 2
DOS1993 Omnitrend Software
Deadline
DOS1982 Infocom
Acquire
DOS1989 IBM
Acquire (1989, DOS) brings boardroom drama to your DOS screen, turning you into a hotel tycoon in a game where the real enemy is... math. It's a faithful adaptation of the classic board game, complete with mergers, hostile takeove...
Larn
DOS1986freeware
Bureaucracy
DOSMac OS1987 Infocom
Douglas Adams, the twisted genius behind Hitchhiker’s Guide, brings you the most terrifying adventure of all: paperwork. Bureaucracy turns mundane modern life into a text-based hellscape of lost forms, passive-aggressive cle...
Anacreon: Reconstruction 4021
DOS1987freeware Thinking Machine Associates
Welcome to the future, where space empires are managed entirely via text and colored dots. Anacreon puts you in charge of an interstellar civilization and lets you conquer galaxies with the graphical intensity of an Excel spreadsh...
Corporate Raider: The Pirate of Wall Street
DOS1988protected SoftServ
Moonmist
DOS1986 Infocom
The Patcher 6.1
DOS1993
Dungeon Master's Assistant Vol 2
DOS1989protected SSI Strategic Simulations Inc.
Hack
DOS1984freeware
The Usurper
DOS1989 Sir-tech Software
Beyond the Titanic
DOS1986 Apogee Software
Before Titanic was a movie with a lot of weeping, there was Beyond the Titanic, a text adventure where surviving the iceberg is just the beginning. The game takes the historic disaster and then says, “What if we added a secr...