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 These text-only video games may seem primitive and outdated and, in fact, the genre almost died with the fast evolving graphics of modern games.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

DOS1982 Magicom Multimedia

Scapeghost

DOS1989 Level 9 Computing

Dungeons of Kroz 2

DOS1989 Apogee Software

Spellbreaker

DOS1985 Infocom

Mission: Mainframe

DOS1987

The President is Missing

DOS1988protected Cosmi Corporation

At the Carnival

DOS1990freeware

Mindshadow

DOSMac OS1985 Interplay Productions

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...

Data Perfect 2.6

DOS1993

Breakers

DOS1986 Synapse Software

Voodoo island

DOS1985 Angelsoft

Amazon

DOS1984 Telarium

Border Zone

DOS1987 Infocom

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...