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 These text-only video games may seem primitive and outdated and, in fact, the genre almost died with the fast evolving graphics of modern games.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

DOS1989freeware Apogee Software

Cutthroats

DOS1984 Infocom

Silicon Dreams

DOS1986 Level 9 Computing

Silicon Dreams by Level 9 Computing is a trilogy of interactive fiction (text adventure) games released in the mid-1980s. The trilogy includes three separate games: Snowball, Return to Eden, and The Worm in Paradise. Each game combines elements of science fiction with puzzle-solving and exploration. All three games are text-based, relying on d...

Border Zone

DOS1987 Infocom

The Astronomy Quiz

DOS1988 Softdisk Publishing

Taipan for Windows

Windows XP/98/952002freeware

Mission: Mainframe

DOS1987

Baseball Mogul 2006

Windows 10/112005

Mickey's Space Adventure

DOS1985 Sierra On-Line

LHA

DOS1988

A Dudley Dilemma

DOS1988

Arachne WWW

DOS1996freeware

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...

Caves of Thor

DOS1989 Apogee Software

Forbidden Castle

DOS1985 Angelsoft

Data Perfect 2.6

DOS1993

Brimstone

DOS1985 Synapse Software

Avon

DOS1989 Topologika Software

Lost Adventures of Kroz

DOS1990freeware Apogee Software

Spellbreaker

DOS1985 Infocom

Amazon

DOS1984 Telarium

At the Carnival

DOS1990freeware

TomeNET

Windows XP/98/95LinuxMac OS2001freeware

TomeNET (Troubles of Middle Earth, Net) is an online, multiplayer rogue-like game set in the world of J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-Earth. It’s a persistent-world game inspired by Angband, a single-player dungeon-crawler based on Tolkien lore. You can play as familiar fantasy races like Elves, Dwarves, Humans, or Hobbits, as well as more obscu...

ZAngband

Windows 10/11Mac OSDOSLinux1999freeware

Zangband is a variant of the popular roguelike game Angband. Zangband, short for Zelazny Angband, was developed by Chris Weisiger and first released in 1994. The game features a fantasy world with diverse races, classes, and monsters. Players explore dungeons, caves, and other environments in a quest to reach the bottom level of the dungeon, d...

The Wizard's Castle

DOS1981freeware

The Wizard's Castle is a classic text-based, dungeon-crawling adventure game released in 1980, designed by Joseph R. Power. The game was originally developed for the Exidy Sorcerer computer and later ported to various platforms, such as the TRS-80 and early IBM PCs. The game is set in a mysterious wizard's castle, where the player takes on the...