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 These text-only video games may seem primitive and outdated and, in fact, the genre almost died with the fast evolving graphics of modern games.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

DOS19863.6/5

Kingdom of Kroz

DOS1988freeware3.7/5 Apogee Software

The Lurking Horror

DOS19874.1/5 Infocom

Wishbringer

DOS19853.7/5 Infocom

The Patcher 6.1

DOS19933.8/5

Hack

DOS1984freeware3.8/5

Lynx

DOS1992freeware3/5

B-1 Nuclear Bomber

DOS19813.6/5 Avalon Hill

The mist

DOS19853.9/5 Angelsoft

Sherlock Holmes: The Vatican Cameos

DOS19864/5 Magicom Multimedia

Borland Turbo Pascal 1.0

DOS19834/5 Borland Software Corporation

Enchanter

DOS19833.3/5 Infocom

The Shadows of Mordor

DOS19883.7/5 Beam Software

Breakers

DOS19864.1/5 Synapse Software

Dragon World

DOS19844.2/5 Telarium

Sorcerer

DOS19844.1/5 Infocom

Dream Zone

DOS19884.2/5 Naughty Dog

Core War Plus

DOS19843.9/5

Zyll

DOS19843.9/5 IBM

CheckIt 3

DOS19902.8/5

Indiana Jones: Revenge of the Ancients

DOS19874/5 Angelsoft

Adventure Game Studio (AGS)

WindowsLinuxMac1997freeware3.9/5

Adventure Game Studio (AGS) is a software development tool that enables users to create point-and-click adventure games. It was originally created by Chris Jones and has been used by game developers to produce a variety of 2D adventure games. AGS provides a scripting language, a visual editor, and various other tools to simplify the game developmen...

Hacker 2: The Doomsday Papers

DOS19863.7/5 Activision

Hacker II: The Doomsday Papers is a video computer game developed by Steve Cartwright and published by Activision. It was released in 1986 and is a sequel to the original Hacker game. The game was available for various home computer systems of the time, including the Apple II, Commodore 64, and MS-DOS.In Hacker II: The Doomsday Papers, players take...