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 These text-only video games may seem primitive and outdated and, in fact, the genre almost died with the fast evolving graphics of modern games.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

DOS19842.8/5

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...

Zork Zero: The Revenge of Megaboz

DOS19894/5 Infocom

Leather Goddesses of Phobos

DOS19864.2/5 Infocom

Dragonriders of Pern

DOS19873.1/5 Everlasting

Amnesia

DOS19864/5 Cognetics corporation

Turbo Pascal 7

DOSWindows 3.xMac19924/5 Borland Software Corporation

Turbo Pascal 7 (TP7) is a programming language and integrated development environment (IDE) that was popular in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was developed by Borland as an evolution of their earlier Turbo Pascal versions. Turbo Pascal 7 was released around 1992.Turbo Pascal 7 gained popularity in educational settings and among hobbyist progra...

Championship Manager Italia

DOS19934.1/5 Sports Interactive Limited

ZZT

DOS1991freeware4.2/5 Epic MegaGames

Ace 2.02

DOS20012.7/5

Castle Adventure

DOS1984freeware4.2/5

1893: A World's Fair Mystery

Windows XP/98/95Mac20033.4/5

Championship Manager

DOS19924.1/5 Domark Software

Championship Manager is the first chapter in one of the most successful football manager games series. The first Championship Manager was a text-based British football/soccer simulation and included teams from four English divisions, European cups and domestic cups as well. Championship Manager was designed by Paul and Oliver Collyer and ...

TomeNET

Windows XP/98/95Linux2003freeware4.4/5

Time and Magik: The Trilogy

DOS19884.1/5 Level 9 Computing

One-Nil Soccer Manager

DOS19923.9/5 New Era Software

One-Nil Soccer Manager is a text-based soccer management simulation game that was popular in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was developed for various home computer systems, including DOS, Commodore 64 and Amiga. In One-Nil Soccer Manager, players take on the role of a soccer team manager, making strategic decisions to guide their team to s...