Text-based games: ASCII, etc.

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 These text-only video games may seem primitive and outdated and, in fact, the genre almost died with the fast evolving graphics of modern games.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

DOS19854.1/5

Arthur: The Quest for Excalibur

DOS19894/5 Infocom

Ascii Sector

WindowsLinuxDOS2007freeware3.8/5

At the Carnival

DOS1990freeware3/5

At-slow4

DOS19893.2/5

Avon

DOS19893.4/5 Topologika Software

B-1 Nuclear Bomber

DOS19813.6/5 Avalon Hill

Ballyhoo

DOS19863.5/5 Infocom

Bank Streek Writer Plus

DOS19863/5

Baseball Mogul

Windows XP/98/9519973.9/5 Infinite Monkey Systems

Baseball Mogul 2006

Windows20054.1/5

Beast

DOS19843.8/5

Beyond the Titanic

DOS19863.8/5 Apogee Software

Beyond Zork: The Coconut of Quendor

DOS19874/5 Infocom

Bible Builder

DOS19923.5/5

Black Friday

DOS19833/5

Boggle

DOS19903.5/5 HVB Software

Border Zone

DOS19873.8/5 Infocom

Borland DBase 5

DOS19944/5 Borland Software Corporation

Borland Eureka: the Solver

DOS19873.9/5 Borland Software Corporation

Borland Eureka: the Solver is an abandoned text-based application developed by Borland Software Corporation and released in 1987 for DOS. The product is designed to solve complex problems, generate tables and plots, and perform what-if analysis. The user writes an equation, sets options, and instructs the software to solve the problem. The pro...

Borland Paradox 4.5

DOSWindows XP/98/9519934/5 Borland Software Corporation

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.

Borland Turbo Basic 1.0

DOS19874.1/5 Borland Software Corporation

Borland Turbo Basic was a programming language developed by Borland, a software company that was prominent in the 1980s and 1990s. Turbo Basic was part of the Turbo series of programming languages and development tools that Borland created during that time.Turbo Basic was designed as a fast and efficient version of the BASIC programming language. B...