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 These text-only video games may seem primitive and outdated and, in fact, the genre almost died with the fast evolving graphics of modern games.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

Sort by:

Turbo Assembler (TASM)

DOSWindows XP/98/951989 Borland Software Corporation

Turbo Assembler and Tools 5.0, often referred to as TASM, is an x86 assembler for MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows. As a key component of Borland's suite of development tools, TASM was packaged alongside Turbo Debugger (TD),...

Norton Commander 5.5

DOS1998 Peter Norton Computing

Norton Commander was one of the most popular and influential file management applications ever released for MS-DOS. Introduced in 1986, it featured an innovative, dual-pane interface that allowed users to perform tasks like copyin...

QBASIC

DOS1991 Microsoft

QBasic, or QuickBASIC, was an interpreted version of the BASIC programming language developed by Microsoft. It was designed to be easy to learn and use, making it accessible to beginners and hobbyist programmers. QBasic was part o...

Zork I: The Great Underground Empire

DOS1982 Infocom

Zork is one of the most popular text-adventures and one of the first interactive fiction games ever created. The first Zork was developed in the seventies and ported on various platform by Infocom in the early 80s. Infocom wa...

dBASE III

DOS1984 Ashton-Tate

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 dB...

Wordstar 4

DOS1986 MicroPro International

WordStar 4 was a popular word processing software program during the early days of personal computing. WordStar 4 included features typical of word processors in that era, allowing users to create, edit, and format documents....

Softporn Adventure

DOS1981freewareNSFW Sierra On-Line

GW-BASIC 3

DOS1988 Microsoft

GW-BASIC (short for Gee Whiz BASIC) is a dialect of the BASIC programming language that was developed by Microsoft. It's one of the early implementations of BASIC and was included as the default programming environment in early ve...

Championship Manager

DOS1992 Domark Software

Before Football Manager devoured your social life, there was Championship Manager. With graphics as bare as a locker room and stats as detailed as a tax form, it’s a numbers lover’s dream. Pick your squad, yell at imag...

ELIZA for DOS

DOS1988

ELIZA, created in the mid-1960s by Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT, was one of the first computer programs to simulate human conversation. Designed as a natural language processing demonstration, ELIZA used pattern matching and substitut...

Borland Turbo Basic 1.0

DOS1987 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 Borlan...

Planetfall

DOS1983 Infocom

Planetfall is an interactive fiction sci-fie game released in 1983 by Infocom, written by Steve Meretzky. It is often considered one of Infocom's best titles. You play as a low-ranking Ensign Seventh Class in the Stellar Patr...

Borland Turbo C v1

DOS1987 Borland Software Corporation

Air Traffic Controller

DOS1985 Cascoly Software

Welcome to the most stressful job in the world - rendered in glorious 1985 DOS graphics! Air Traffic Controller lets you experience the thrill of herding aircraft without the luxury of coffee breaks or radar resolution. It’s...

Turbo Pascal 7

DOSWindows 3.xMac OS1992 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. Tu...

Rogue

Windows XP/98/95DOSLinuxMac OS1984 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 an...

Championship Manager 2: The Italian Leagues Season 96/97

DOS1996 Eidos Interactive

Catenaccio! Passion! Endless tactics! Championship Manager 2: The Italian Leagues delivers Serie A drama in spreadsheet form. You may not smell the espresso or hear the vuvuzelas, but you'll definitely feel the pressure of keeping...

Ancient Domains of Mystery (ADOM) v1.1

Windows XP/98/95DOSLinux1996freeware

ADOM is what happens when a rogue, a wizard, and a hungry troll walk into a dungeon and never come out. Released in 1996, this roguelike classic is brutal, brilliant, and unapologetically text-heavy. Permadeath is the norm, the st...

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

DOSMac OS1984freeware 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 D...

VisiCalc 1.0

DOS1979freeware Software Arts

VisiCalc was the first spreadsheet software for personal computers, and it played a pivotal role in the early history of personal computing. It was developed by Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston and first released in 1979 for the App...

Borland Turbo Pascal 3.0

DOS1986 Borland Software Corporation

Andromeda Conquest

DOS1982 Avalon Hill

One-Nil Soccer Manager

DOS1992 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-Ni...

Wall Street Raider

DOS1986

Borland DBase 5

DOS1994 Borland Software Corporation

ZZT

DOS1991freeware Epic MegaGames

ZZT (1991, DOS) looks like it was drawn by an enthusiastic ASCII artist with too much time and not enough colors. And yet, it’s brilliant. Part action game, part puzzle adventure, part game creation tool, ZZT is the reason s...

Norton Commander 1.0

DOS1986 Peter Norton Computing

Norton Commander was a file manager and editor application released by Peter Norton Computing for DOS. Norton Commander used a text-based user interface with side-by-side panels and featured copy, delete, editing and preview ...

Baseball Mogul

Windows XP/98/951997 Infinite Monkey Systems

Baseball Mogul (1997) was the original release that kicked off the whole franchise. Developed by Clay Dreslough and published by Infinite Monkey Systems, this was a pioneer in the world of sports management sims. It was released f...

DOSBox

Windows XP/98/95LinuxMac OS2002freeware

DOSBox is an open-source emulator that allows you to run software and games designed for the MS-DOS operating system on modern computers. As you probably already know, MS-DOS was a popular operating system used in the 1980s and ea...