Wednesday, 24th September 2014

Text-only games: roguelikes and interactive fiction

In the past, lots of home computer games (PC, C64, Speccy, etc.) used ascii characters (simple text) to represent the game world, the interface... well, everything on screen.
These text-only video games may seem primitive and outdated now and, in fact, the genre almost died with the fast evolving graphics of modern games.
What's left? A few genres traditionally linked to the beautiful world of ascii characters still survives: roguelikes (nethack, angband, etc.) and interactive fiction, for example.
If you want to learn more about interactive fiction, take a look at these sites:

the interactive fiction archive
the interactive fiction database

If you want to learn about roguelikes, follow these links:

Temple of the roguelike
RogueBasin

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