The best text-based games

Anacreon: Reconstruction 4021 is one of the first 4x turn-based strategy games, ASCII based. Anacreon is set in space, as most 4x sci-fi games are, and was published by Thinking Machines Associates and designed by George Moromisato who later re-released the game as freeware.

One-Nil Soccer Manager is a text-based soccer management simulation game that was popular in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was developed for various home computer systems, including DOS, Commodore 64 and Amiga. In One-Nil Soccer Manager, players take on the role of a soccer team manager, making strategic decisions to guide their team to s...

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...

Bureaucracy is an abandoned text-adventure game designed by Douglas Adams (yes, the writer of The Hitchhiker Guide of the Galaxy), developed and published by Infocom in 1987. Bureaucracy is a peculiar interactive fiction; the game challenges you to solve frustrating bureaucratic problems in a world populated by strange characters.

Norton Commander was a file manager and editor application released by Peter Norton Computing for DOS. Norton Commander used a text-based user interface with side-by-side panels and featured copy, delete, editing and preview any kind of file easily: it was an improvement over the command-line only MS-DOS interface. Norton Commander 1.0 was fir...