Abandonware DOS title

Text-based games: ASCII, etc. sorted by release date

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 These text-only video games may seem primitive and outdated and, in fact, the genre almost died with the fast evolving graphics of modern games.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.
castle-adventure-04

Castle Adventure

DOS1984freeware4.2/5
corewar-plus-05

Core War Plus

DOS19843.9/5
crime-and-punishment-05

Crime and Punishment

DOS19844.1/5 Mindscape
cutthroats-02

Cutthroats

DOS19843.3/5 Infocom
dbase3-02

dBASE III

DOS19844.3/5
dBASE III is a relational database management system (RDBMS) that was popular in the late 1980s. It was developed by Ashton-Tate, a software company. dBASE III was a successor to the earlier dBASE II and was part of a series of dBASE products. dBASE III played a significant role in the history of database management systems, especially during ...
hd-deskmate-01

DeskMate

DOS19843.3/5
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 computers in the late 1980s and early 1990s.Deskmate included various applications such as a word processor, spreadsheet, calen...
dnd_text-02

DND

DOS19844.1/5
dragon-world-01

Dragon World

DOS19844.2/5 Telarium
earthlydelights-1

Earthly delights

DOS19843.6/5 Datamost
farehneith451-04

Farenheit 451

DOS19843.4/5 Telarium
felony-02

Felony!

DOS19844/5 BrainBank
hack-5

Hack

DOS1984freeware3.8/5
holy-grail-04

Holy Grail

DOS19843.7/5
questprobe-hulk-01

Questprobe featuring The Hulk

DOS19843.8/5 Adventure International
rogue-1

Rogue

Windows XP/98/95DOSLinuxMac19844.2/5 Artificial Intelligence Design
Rogue is one of the first RPGs in the history of video gaming. It's a text-based dungeon crawler in which you have to fight your way in the dungeon to recover the Amulet of Yendor. Rogue became popular around 1980 on mainframes and later ported to various platforms, including DOS in 1984. Rogue is simply the father of all the roguelike games that c...
seastalker-01

Seastalker

DOS19844/5 Infocom
sorcerer-1

Sorcerer

DOS19844.1/5 Infocom
suspect-01

Suspect

DOS19844.2/5 Infocom
hitchhikerguide-1

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

DOSMac1984freeware4.2/5 Infocom
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a humorous free text adventure game based on the novel of the same name written by Douglas Adams (if you never read it, shame on you!). The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was designed by Douglas Adams himself and interactive fiction god Steve Eric Meretzky, it was released by Infocom in 1984 for DOS and for...
zork3-1

Zork III: The Dungeon Master

DOS19844/5 Infocom
zyll-1

Zyll

DOS19843.9/5 IBM
_amfv_001

A Mind Forever Voyaging

DOSMac19854.1/5 Infocom
air-traffic-controller-02

Air Traffic Controller

DOS19854.2/5 Cascoly Software
amuletyendor-4

Amulet of Yendor

DOS19853.6/5 Keypunch Software
armchair-quarterback-01

Armchair Quarterback

DOS19854.1/5
brimstone-1

Brimstone

DOS19853.4/5 Synapse Software
einstein-writer-01

Einstein Writer 7

DOS19853.5/5
essex-02

Essex

DOS19853.6/5 Synapse Software