Text-based games: ASCII, etc. sorted by release date
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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Castle Adventure
DOS1984freeware4.2/5
Core War Plus
DOS19843.9/5
Crime and Punishment
DOS19844.1/5 Mindscape
Cutthroats
DOS19843.3/5 Infocom
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 ...
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
DOS19844.1/5
Dragon World
DOS19844.2/5 Telarium
Drug wars: a game based on the New York drug market
DOS19843.3/5
Earthly delights
DOS19843.6/5 Datamost
Farenheit 451
DOS19843.4/5 Telarium
Felony!
DOS19844/5 BrainBank
Hack
DOS1984freeware3.8/5
Holy Grail
DOS19843.7/5
Questprobe featuring The Hulk
DOS19843.8/5 Adventure International
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
DOS19844/5 Infocom
Sorcerer
DOS19844.1/5 Infocom
Suspect
DOS19844.2/5 Infocom
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...
Zork III: The Dungeon Master
DOS19844/5 Infocom
Zyll
DOS19843.9/5 IBM
A Mind Forever Voyaging
DOSMac19854.1/5 Infocom
Air Traffic Controller
DOS19854.2/5 Cascoly Software
Alice: The Personal Pascal
DOS19854.3/5
Amulet of Yendor
DOS19853.6/5 Keypunch Software
Armchair Quarterback
DOS19854.1/5
Brimstone
DOS19853.4/5 Synapse Software
Einstein Writer 7
DOS19853.5/5
Essex
DOS19853.6/5 Synapse Software