Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 468: Text Adventures

Episode Date: July 18, 2022

Text adventures: what are they, and where did they hide all the graphics? Until now, these questions have gone unanswered. But this week, we'll be looking at the world of games that existed before any kind of mandatory visual component—and continue to exist to this very day. And we have a real expert on hand: Aaron Reed, author of the upcoming comprehensive text adventure respective,  50 Years of Text Games: From Oregon Trail to A.I. Dungeon. So listen in as host Bob Mackey helps steer the Retronauts podcast ship through these formerly uncharted waters. (By us, anyway.) Retronauts is a completely fan-funded operation. To support the show, and get two full-length exclusive episodes every month, as well as access to 50+ previous bonus episodes, please visit the official Retronauts Patreon at patreon.com/retronauts.

Retronauts is part of the HyperX Podcast Network. Find us in more great shows at podcast.hyperx.com. This week on Retronauts, we use our words. Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of Retronauts. I'm your host for this one, Bob Mackie, and today we're going to be talking about text adventures or interactive fiction, if you prefer. Now, this is a very important subject, but unfortunately, one we've mostly treated as a footnote in the discussion of other games. But today, we have a true expert on board to enlighten me and all of us out there about this important and actually ongoing video game genre. Guests, please introduce yourself for our audience.

Hey, everyone. I'm Erin A. Reid. It's great to be here. My background is kind of as an indie game designer, but I've also been an academic. I've worked in the games industry a little bit. But kind of my primary identity is really as a writer. And the genre I've really been interested in is the genre of interactive fiction games, which is basically computer games that are mostly using words to create gameplay and tell stories. So I've been writing those games more or less my whole life. And then more recently, I did a long blog. series getting into their history and it's just something I'm I really love it as a genre I just love the combination of written words and and the stuff you can do with digital platforms that's right and you have a book coming out currently as of this recording the Kickstarter is still ongoing unfortunately it will be over by the time this releases but the book is called 50 years of text games from Oregon Trail to AI dungeon I'm not I'm not sure how it works Aaron we did our we did our Kickstarter a long time ago can you still donate after it closes yeah there'll be you'll be able to pre-order on backer kit after the campaign in. So if you search for it,

you'll find links directing you to there. Excellent. And I also wanted to congratulate you because as of this recording, you made about 10 times more than your goal. So that's awesome. Yeah. It's incredible to see the response. I sort of had a theory there were a lot of fans of these games out there who would come out of the woodwork for this project. And it's really been awesome to see that happening. Can you talk about the book project, just the scope of it, and how it grew over time and especially over the course of, you know, unlocking a lot of goals on the Kickstarter. Yeah.

So the origin came from the fact that this was a couple years ago. I was realizing that the Oregon Trail, which is in the title, was going to have its 50th anniversary in 2021 at the time. And a lot of people are familiar from the 80s remake of that game that a lot of people, my age played in computer labs in school when they were kids. But that was actually a remake of a game that was already more than. 10 years old at that point. So the very first version of that game was played on teletypes and debuted in 1971. And so I thought, you know, 50 years was an interesting anniversary and I

conceived this idea of what if I took one game, one text game from each of those 50 years and did kind of a deep dive analysis into how it worked, why it was made, what the context was, around when it was made, what its influence was. And so it sort of became this interesting tour through this genre that's gone through all of these different forms from, you know, everything from Apple Watch games to games running on, you know, teletypes and mainframes and all kinds of things in between. And can you talk about how far you go back with this genre? You have a lot of experience both as a designer of games and as a fan of games.

Like, where does it start with you? And have you really been pursuing this your whole life? Yeah, more or less. My parents, I think, still have a handwritten, choose-your-and-adventure book. wrote when I was eight or nine on a completely with a pencil and paper. So yeah, it's kind of been something that's been in my blood for a long time. Yeah, I really kind of got into making these kind of games when I discovered when I was in college that there was a whole community of people online who were still making new games like this. So in the 1980s, text games

had been really big. They were some of the best selling games in the very early computer era because the graphics on early computers were so primitive that a text game actually made a much better demo because it seemed so much more sophisticated and mature than the kind of graphics you had at that time. By the end of the 80s, that it kind of changed in those games were no longer sort of commercially viable, but this whole community of fans and amateurs had kind of discovered them and started saying, oh, this is actually an interesting medium. What kind of stories could you tell with this foundation? What kind of gameplay things could you do when you really get into what an interactive story could be without sort of all of the needs of having graphics and sound

and video and the sort of, you know, interactive movie thing we're more used to from interactive stories and games. What's an interactive book instead, right? So all of these people online were experimenting with making these games. There were annual jams and competitions and this whole community. And I got really into that, that community of people and started making work and experimenting. And it was a ton of fun. And I learned a lot that then became useful later on, you know, as I kind of transitioned into a career, making actual games and doing, or not actual games that's you know maybe not giving them credit but um you know games games that are you know selling in in places that you know to play games so yeah i think i think a lot of people are

guilty of this and it's not something to feel guilty about but uh i mean we usually just think of games as things that are still commercially viable uh if a genre stops being commercially viable we're like well that's dead now and we don't realize well no people are still making these like when point and click adventure games died in quotes for about five to seven years. They still existed. People were still making them, but just because you didn't see

a new monkey island game on the shelf, people thought, well, the genre's over. So I liked looking into this just to see, basically, I could be being very reductive, but it seems like commercially this, this genre was dead by the mid-80s,

but from there, there has been almost a limitless amount of works produced. And if you only wanted to play Texas Adventure games for the rest of your life, you could do that, usually for free.

Like, there is just, it was daunting to get into this. And I'm glad there's an expert on board because there's only so much I could do. And because these games are so time consuming, a lot of them, only so much I could actually play for the sake of this podcast. But, yeah, this genre simply never ended. And there is so much going on on so many platforms currently. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, just the range of stuff, too.

I mean, so text adventures is kind of a particular subset of this. But interactive fiction and text games and other terms kind of cover, you know, this kind of huge range of games from like mobile romance titles that are largely text driven to, you know, audio games that use spoken words and are, you know, made by for blind players. There's games, you know, BBS games from the 80s was a whole genre. There was played by mail games, which is the thing that died out. So just all of these kind of different traditions all working within the same space. And it's really fascinating to be how many connections there are. and how many variations of this kind of general idea there's been. And we usually talk up front about our experience with the genre.

And I haven't mentioned mine. And in case you haven't noticed, it's very little. Like for me, I love graphical adventure games. And for me, in my own history, and I do feel guilty about this after looking into what you specialize in, it all really begins with Mystery House for me, because that is the beginning of graphical adventure games. Sierra would stick with their text input to make it. sort of feel more like a text adventure, but

you would have images on the screen and then direct control over a character. And of course, growing up in the 80s, I read the choose your own adventure books. I read different variants of those, not just the choose your own adventures. And right now, like I do love point-and-click adventure games.

I'm excited about the new monkey island this year. But I also really like Japanese adventure games that are very text-heavy and all menu-based. And I feel like that is probably the closest thing I play to a adventure although it's sort of the inverse in that you have very limited verbs and very limited actions where in a text adventure usually whatever you think of you can try in those games

usually talk to people you can use items you can maybe do a few other things but that's it like where do you draw the line um when it comes to the definition because it seems very loose looking into your notes and um you know the games you're looking at for your book project it seems like, well, some text adventures have images, some of them have sounds, some of them have music. It's not just a blinking cursor on a black screen. Right. Yeah, that's a good question. Yeah, kind of what I did really was I made a line and then I allowed myself to cross over it a few times. So there were games. So every game I talk about in this book, for example, is a digital game except for Choose Your Own Adventure number one, which I talk about, even though

it's a book, but it's such an interesting example of an interactive story that became really culturally relevant for a while, and it influenced a lot of later, you know, digital game makers. So kind of at the high level, I think my definition of text game is a game that you'd prefer to share excerpts from rather than screenshots, which is kind of an interesting division because games, we think of games as being so visual, right? And like a screenshot is the thing that's going to capture what it's like to play that game. And you can take a screenshot of a text game, but it's not really especially useful, right? Like what color the text was or, what the font is or whatever.

Like, sometimes games are going to use that to capture a certain aesthetic or something, but it's really the words, right, that are what you want to share. So that was kind of my single overall guiding principle. But then I kind of, you know, had some digressions from there. So, um, so roguelikes, for example, are a genre that was originally using text characters to create, you know, like a top down view of a dungeon you're exploring. And, um, kind of by my definition, that wasn't really what I wanted to cover because I'm more interested in sort of like, you know, words, right, not text characters themselves used as

like surrogate graphics. But I do talk about Dwar Fortress, again, because that's such a fascinating example of a game that's primarily not using, you know, traditional graphics and doing something really interesting and incredible with narrative in a different kind of space. So, yeah, I'm a big fan of coming up with definitions and then being a little loose with them because I think that just allows you to cover a more interesting, broader swath of space and get into some really interesting conversations about the edge cases of a particular arena. That's a good policy to have because having, you know, written and talked about video games for so long, I think some of the most pointless discussions you can have are, is this a

role-playing game? Is this an RTS? Just because it's so subjective, everyone has their own definitions and we can never agree. But ultimately, I think whatever your gut feeling is is usually how it works. And then you can develop a rubric for what fits into it if you want to be a little more scientific about it, a little more analytical. But yeah, I like that you have a looser

interpretation because, again, yeah, like if you think about text adventure games without really looking into the history, you will just think of the blinking cursor. I don't want to talk more about your process in writing your blog series, in writing your book, 50 years of text games. What was your process? I know a lot of these games, many of them have been archived,

even the oldest ones. You can still play, but a lot of them haven't. How did you access them? How much did you play of them? How did you really dig into these games? It's such a gigantic undertaking. Yeah. So definitely it was really important with me to actually play the games and engage with them, even the ones that I had played before and thought I knew really well to go back to them again and, you know, just play through again, right? Just just get a fresh take on them. And yeah, some of those games, you know, that game community in general has done a really good job with archiving in part because the games tend to be smaller, right? Because they don't have, you know, massive multimedia assets. But also there's just a lot of people really passionate about preserving that history. So the majority of the games I covered,

you can still play via an emulator. An interesting thing I came across, though, is a lot of those games have become more famous and accessible in sort of later versions, right? So Oregon Trail is actually a pretty good example of that. It's really easy to find online, like, an emulated version of the Apple Organ Trail from 1986, but it's a lot harder to actually track on, well, what was the original 1971 version like to play? And a big thing that was important for me, too, was trying to, you know, get to the stuff that isn't necessarily captured in an emulator. So what was it actually like to play this game on the hardware it would have been played on at the time? And an interesting thing about games on teletypes, for example, is that the text

sort of came in at a certain speed and that cadence of, you know, the noise of the machine and the speed of the text coming in kind of, I think, influenced the design of some of those games and the expectations for how people would play them. And a good example of that is rocket, which was one of the first games that kind of turned into a whole genre of lunar lander games where you're trying to land a capsule on the moon and budget your fuel and everything. And that game, you are inputting your commands for how much fuel you want to spend at 10-second intervals, but it would actually take about 10 seconds for it to process your input and print the next line. So when you played that game on a teletype in the 70s, you were essentially playing it

in real time. And that's not an effect you necessarily. necessarily understand if you played on an emulator where the text just instantly scrolls in each time. So, yeah, a lot of that, trying to get to get to that, what was it like to sit around this game in that year and play it was really important to me. And yeah, preservation and capturing those ephemeral things, I think is really important, too. As a fan of podcasts, you probably thought about starting one of your own, introducing the new HyperX DuoCast. The DuoCast has all the essential features and aspiring podcasts would want from USB,

mic with HyperX favorites like Tap to Mute in a vibrant mute indicator. It's compact and elegantly styled, perfect for situations where you want a mic that looks great, but isn't too extra. Check out the new HyperX DuoCast, available at Target.com or shop direct at hyperX.com. And what do you feel are misconceptions about the genre as a whole? Yeah, I think you definitely mentioned the big one, is that it's dead. So, you know, in the last 10 years section of this, right? So the 2010s, there are, I think, three or four games that have had more than a million players, right?

So it's not a lot of it is sort of niche and there's a lot of niche aspects of it, but it does intersect the mainstream in a lot of interesting ways. So I talk about clicker games, right? So in around 2013, 2014, there was this influx of games like cookie clicker and a dark room and the paper clips game that most of them use mostly text or maybe just some basic graphics. and they became insanely popular, right? There was a couple weeks in 2015, I think, when everyone was playing Universal Paperclips and trying to get to the end of that game when they probably should have been working

or whatever at the office. And there's games like Fall in London. It's a hugely popular browser game or Kingdom of Loathing that, you know, years before that was a hugely popular browser game. So I think that's definitely a misconception that these games are irrelevant or that they don't really affect

the mainstream gaming conversation. But there are just a lot of examples of times when these games actually have been, you know, come into the dominant conversation. And a lot of people, I think, especially who are game designers interested in narrative, will be playing these games as they're getting into that field or learning how the craft works.

So I think they still do have a lot to say to mainstream games today. And how have the ways people play these games changed over the years? I mean, we mentioned teletype machines earlier. I think what you think of, again, is like somebody in front of a boxy computer with just, you know, the blinking cursor. But, you know, inputs have changed, means of playing them have changed. You can play them on mobile platforms now. How is that evolved over time?

Yeah. The thing I realized as I was working through this series was that this is really just kind of the history of computing in with the kind of a particular lens of looking at it. So, you know, this spans everything from the very earliest computers to, you know, the latest in AI. and smartwatches and you know all of the tech of the last few years it just covers that whole swath of things i think one of the the big things you definitely see is the way input affordances and output affordances for that matter influence how people relate to text so one sort of obvious example of that is yeah you know you mentioned the the stereotypical image of a text adventures you're

sitting at a computer probably with the CRT screen typing text in on your keyboard right um when the dominant platform moves to mobile phones that don't have or have a different kind of keyboard interface, you know, how does that change the way people want to be interacting with text on a platform? Or you look at games, you know, the first wave of iPad games that were dealing with text. And that was an interface that was so focused at the time on the kind of novelty of, you know, having this big canvas that you could do gestures on and do this stuff that wasn't necessarily typing first, right? So how did that affect how designers thought? about how text was presented or how text was being input. So I think there's a lot of, you know,

ways that platforms, both hardware and software influence the way players interacted things and the way designers think about things. And text is an interesting lens to look at that because it's been a constant in one way or another, you know, all through that history. But the way we've kind of displayed it and dealt with it has has kind of shifted as the technology shifts. So I do want to talk about just as briefly as we can, but still it's going to be a long discussion. The history of text adventures, it's hard to know where to begin because it begins obviously before computing, before computers, before electricity. This is something that's existed on the printed page before it existed on a screen.

And I, as someone, I have a background in literature, I've got a master's degree in literature. I do a lot of reading still, or at least I try to. It's harder and harder these days. but I recently in the past like 15 years became a big fan of mystery novels and I think it's because I'm a fan of video games and the game you're playing with a novel like that is like very implicit

and I've often taken notes while reading mystery novels and some mystery novels have like maps in them maps are not just for fantasy books or not just for Lord of the Rings and it's just like oh I'm a big gaming dork and that's why I like these can you talk about how like interaction fiction began

even before you know any kind of keyboards were thought of, any kind of monitors were thought of. Yeah, it is really interesting. And like I mentioned, you know, that's one of the things I love about is it connects to all of these much older traditions in different ways. And mystery novels in particular are really fascinating. So I think it was the Ellery Queen books in the 1920s or 30s started putting an explicit challenge to the reader.

So you'd sort of read through most of the book. You'd get to this page that said, you know, you now have enough information to solve the murder, so see if you can figure it out before you turn the page and read the rest of the book. And that was, yeah, I think it's very right that that's in a lot of ways of prototypical computer game, right? It's asking you as the player of this mystery to, you know, try to solve it. And the book, of course, on a printed page can't know whether you guessed right or not. It can't actually, you know, let you interact with it directly, but it's asking you to participate in the telling of the story, which is super cool. And there were a lot of other kind of early examples of things like that

were books were asking you to engage with them in a way other than just reading them. One of my favorites is a book from way back in the 1700s called Tristam Shandy that was this long book with all of these rambling digressions. But one of the things that did is it just kept challenging all of these sort of assumptions about books that people had. Like it would ask you to go back and reread previous chapters or to skip the next chapter or to write something in the book or you know, it would address the reader directly in different ways. And it was really just sort of challenging this notion that, you know, the writer is the active one and the reader is the passive one in that relationship.

And that's just how it always is. So hundreds of years before computers, this book was kind of questioning some of those assumptions. So, yeah, I love kind of connecting to these older traditions of, you know, different kinds of literature because I think, you know, there's a lens where you can look at text games that seems. kind of like old fashioned because they're not using the latest graphics, but there's another lens, I think, in which they're taking part in this like kind of ancient tradition of questioning the relationship between authors and readers, which is just really fascinating to me. Yeah, it really shows. I think we've always been very bored and we always have wanted to engage

with things, even, you know, just a sheet of paper with words printed on it. I remember my enjoyment of these books, like the Chooseer and Adventure stuff, it went beyond that. Like I would try to find other versions of them and there weren't too many in my library or like you know in my scholastic book club but i do remember uh oddly enough there was a super mario brother series of choosur and adventures and i thought they were so cool because uh they actually gave you an inventory so when you were reading the book you actually had to write down what items you picked up so they were uh even like as late as uh the 90s they were still pushing that pretty far uh with like i mean it was obviously the honor system it's like well i can just pretend i picked up the mushroom and

see what happens. But yeah, it's surprising how far they pushed just text on a page to become an interactive item. Yeah, there were so many interesting game book experiments. I really love there's a one of the Chooseer and Adventure books is about trying to find this hidden utopia that no one can find. And the solution is that like the winning ending is on a page that it never tells you to turn to. The only way you can get to it is if you're flipping through the book and happen to see it. And you're like, wait a minute, what's on this page? So again, it's sort of breaking a rule that it's established as a genre, right, that you can only navigate by being instructed to turn to a particular page and saying, like, maybe the way to find this is to break

out of your, your assumptions, right? And then just another example I really love is there was a series called microadventure in the 80s that was kind of a lightweight chooseer and adventure clone. But it had this cool thing where the characters were these sort of like teenage hackers. And every now and then they would get this problem that they would have to write a program to solve. And the book would actually have a basic program that you had to type in and run to do something like decipher a code or play a little mini game to pick a lock or something. So I really love that as an example of like a book and this computer program that you're typing in, interacting with each other to help tell the story. It was really cool idea.

So you brought up computers. I want to talk about the beginning of this genre on actual computing platform. So for my understanding, this all started in 1975 with colossal cave adventure, which you can still play online. but I'm actually not sure if Hunt the Wumpus came first. Can you explain the origins in the distant past? Yeah, it's always interesting trying to pinpoint the first and what, you know, what exactly that means. But yeah, so Hunt the Wampas does predate Classically of Adventure. That one dates to 73, I think.

Okay. But yeah, it's kind of a question of what are the defining features, right? who did what first. But yeah, Hunt the Wumpus, you were exploring a little cave of 20 rooms that were connected in a complex way. It's definitely, I think, one of the earliest games that's asking you to sort of explore a fixed map, a fixed space in that kind of way. So like, for example, Oregon Trails a little earlier. And in that, you're moving westward across the country, but kind of not in discrete rooms. There's just like a counter of miles that's, that's ticking up. So you don't really get the sense that you're like moving between specific places. In Hunt-on-Wumpus,

you have this specific room set of caves you're exploring so that was really interesting um you have objects in that uh inherently because you have um a bow and arrow that you're shooting monsters with uh so you have enemies also you have challenges so it has a lot of things that kind of are prototypical text adventure things um but then colossal cave which came out a few years later um took advantage of the fact that computers were getting powerful enough and had enough memory and storage space that you can actually have long bits of text so the really interesting thing about that game it was created by a caver

who had spent a lot of his free time exploring and mapping caves in Kentucky and he created this game that would actually give you these like paragraph long descriptions of the rooms you were crawling through and they were sort of they felt really real because they were informed by his real life experiences exploring this cave

and so that was kind of one of the first times that you really saw prose right fictional text used to kind of transport you into this simulated world. And people just found that incredibly fascinating. There's a famous anecdote that the release of adventure set the entire computing industry back by two weeks because literally everyone with access to a computer at that time, like dropped whatever they were doing to play it and try to figure out how to beat it. And that game really kind of, you know, most people agree is what spawned the entire computer game industry because it was so popular and successful

that in the next couple of years as home computers started becoming a thing, everyone was like well we need an adventure we need you know something like that to sell you know software for this new these new machines we're selling and a lot of the very first commercially sold computer games were adventure clones so it really kind of kicked off that whole idea of a commercial computer game genre yeah and people may not know this if they have not looked into the genre of games but the way you played these games and the way you access them you did not go to Radio Shack and you would not say One Hunt the Lumpus please and they would give you a box.

You had to have access to a supercomputer almost entirely always on a college campus. And you the teletype machine that was just, was that printed paper that was being spelled out for you? There was no monitor for these

a lot of these early games, correct? Yeah, that's right. So CRTs sort of existed at this point, but they were still really expensive and they weren't really hooked up to computers super often. So yeah, in the early 70s, you would have a distant mainframe computer that was pretty powerful, especially for the time. You would connect to it over a modem with a teletype, which was basically just kind of a glorified typewriter that you could type things into, but it could also type things back

based on signals it was receiving over the modem. So yeah, that's another thing that you don't really get the same way in an emulator is when you were exploring adventure in 1976, you had just a spool of paper that it was typing these text descriptions on. And if you wanted to go back and review something you'd already seen you could just like you know let get the literal scroll back right like pull pull the paper off the top of the thing and find the part where it had printed the room description you know from where you were earlier um so yeah um it was a i think kind of a different kind of feel than when you just see text more a family on a screen right you were actually um you were creating a physical record of your explorations which was a different kind of feeling it was not as

eco-friendly i guess as gaming is today it's true yeah just spinning out reams of paper. Yeah, like these all like had their roots in academia, it sounds like, which were the institutions that could afford these. And obviously,

like I said earlier, people are just always very bored and they're always looking for ways to play. And it's, these computers were not designed to make games. The idea of game design was barely in existence in terms of, you know,

using these giant machines to make games. But people found away. And it sounds like, um, these were very collaborative, uh, these games. like people would add to them, they would develop over time.

Can you explain just how did this happen? Because these machines are so primitive. Just the idea that they're able to do these things seems incredible to me. Yeah, I think that's actually a really key point, is that it took computers getting into enough spaces that you had little communities of people cropping up using them before you really saw games and innovation kind of start happening. So yeah, you know, as early as the,

the 50s, the 60s, you had, you know, these huge million dollar computers in various places and people would try creating games on evenings and weekends, you know, it was never something they were supposed to be doing with their time. But, you know, you saw like an early checkers game or you saw, you know, tick-tac-toe game. But it was all, you know, for the most part, just kind of, you know, things like that, right? Like ports of existing familiar board games or things like that. By the 70s, you started to get these little microcommunities popping up around places where, you know, there were mainframes that you could access. So universities, a really interesting early example with Hunt the Wumpus, actually,

is it came out of a place called the People's Computer Center that was set up in California by a group of people who really felt that computers should, you know, get out of universities and big businesses and be put in the hands of everyday people. So they basically got a storefront set up and they rented a computer. And they basically said anyone can come off in off the street and access it. and we're going to run classes to teach you how to use the computer and we're going to, you know, have weekly meetups and things like that. And Hunt the Wumpus was created by someone involved at that center,

and it was kind of part of this conversation that had been going on in the form of games. Like it was a reaction to an earlier game that wasn't quite as sophisticated about kind of trying to find a monster in a grid of number of rooms. And that game in turn was kind of a remake of another game someone had made there. That was a little simpler. So I think it's just, it's really fascinating to see how as soon as you have a group of people who are all coming together trying to, you know, make something cool to show their friends, you start getting these evolutions and this much more faster iteration where people are

building on other people's ideas and really trying to figure out, you know, like, what's the coolest thing we can do with this? And I think you see that again and again throughout this history. Another interesting thing I found, I just thought of, is that people making these games, we're not interested in like copyright or profits. This is just a, a way to play. When did these games start becoming commercial products? Yeah, it was an interesting transition

because basically the notion that software was a thing you could profit on didn't exist at first because it just wasn't a thing that people had yet considered could one day be a market share. There's an example I love in one of the first space trading games where you're flying around the galaxy

swapping goods and trying to make a profit where there's this list of fictional you know kind of sci-fi goods like crystals and stuff that you can trade and one of them is software and if you stop and think about it in the early 70s that would have been totally science fiction right the notion that you could go around buying and selling software to make a profit was not something that anyone was doing in the real world because software existed at that point but it was all sort of like you know you'd rent you'd rent a computer from IBM and you would get free software as part of that

or or you'd hire someone to write software for you but yeah it wasn't a thing you'd go in and buy off the store shelf. So yeah, kind of around the end of the 70s, you started seeing the first generation of personal computers that people could actually buy and take home and use on their own. And along with that, you started seeing personal computer software. And there was a company called Adventure International that was founded in 1979. So you'll note Adventure again. So that game became such a buyword for computer game that it kind of, it named the genre eventually of adventure games. And a lot of early companies had the word adventure in their name because of that. Adventure International was probably the first company founded exclusively to sell computer

games. It was founded in the late, very end of the 70s, basically, December 79, I think. And because they were basically the first out the gate with that, for a couple years, they became insanely popular. So they expanded to something like 100 employees in like 18 months. They had just kind of like cornered that very early early market and a lot of the first generation of computer game companies like broder bun and sierra came out of people who had you know worked for adventure international or interned there or were somehow involved with that but they made these very basic text games that were actually far simpler than games like adventure because those games were designed to run on mainframes but home computer games had just a tiny tiny footprint of memory and storage space and processing power

so it was kind of a miracle to get something at all like adventure running on a home computer even if it was just a tiny strip down like you're in a canyon and that's all of the room description you get right because you have a thousand, 24 bytes

of memory or something that you have to squeeze your entire game into. But yeah, the story of that company is really interesting. They negotiated a deal with Marvel Comics and I think 1985 to make computer games based on Marvel Comics characters which is the first deal that they had ever made like that. And today, something like that would be worth billions and billions of

dollars. But they were basically the first people to call up Marvel and say, hey, like, what if we tried to make, you know, a digital game with your characters? So we've done histories of Spider-Man games and X-Men games. And some of their earliest games are tech adventure games. Yep. Yep. That was Adventure International. Yep. So, yeah. But yeah, it was a really interesting transition. And then as computers became more popular, you know, the market obviously just exploded. So at the end of the 70s, it was people in their garages, you know, putting games into plastic baggies and sending them out. By the end of the 80s, it was, you know, a multi-billion dollar industry. So just, you know, an incredibly explosive period of growth. And do you

think it's any coincidence that, you know, from the, let's say, mid-70s to the late 80s, we're seeing the explosion of text adventure games, but also we're seeing a resurgence of J.R. Tolkien that began in late 60s, I believe. And also, D&D began around the same time as Texas Adventures in 1974. All of these things seem to be of the same nature or at least influencing each other. What are your thoughts on that? Yeah, that's a really interesting

definitely both, you know, D&D and Tolkien were both hugely influential in early games. There's an interesting transition kind of where a lot of the early 70s games like the biggest thing that's kind of inspiring them is Star Trek. Like there are so many Star Trek games, you know, space battle games. That's kind of like the dominant thing in geek culture, I think, at that time. But yeah, by the mid-70s, you've kind of had, you know, Tolkien has gotten more popular. Dungeons and Dragons came out. And yeah, you definitely see this huge shift in the kinds of games people are making towards

fantasy adventure games and swords and sorcery and all that kind of stuff. It's actually a really interesting challenge for the book was trying to trace the genealogy of all of the seven these computer games called Dungeon. There's something like 14 separate games, all titled Dungeon that came out around that time. So trying to figure out, like, you know, who came first, who did what first, you know, what the relationship between them is. It was a really interesting challenge.

But yeah, it was an interesting kind of nexus of, you know, the kinds of people interested in Tolkien and D&D were also very much the kinds of people interested in early computers. and it just became a real ubiquitous theme that arguably still continues today for basing computer games off of. And it looks like the most commercially viable time for this genre was the early to mid-80s.

Can you talk about how text adventures grew during this time? For me, based on what I know about them, this is where they did feel like what point-and-click adventure games would become, where especially like the Douglas Adams games where it's a lot of crazy what, you know, adventure gamers call moon logic, you know, a lot of adversarial stances against the player in a fun way. But these games were designed to be challenged.

I mean, I think for the past 15 years, we all understand that if you buy a game, most people can finish it or there are ways for the game to push you towards the end. It's like a consumer proposition where, yes, you will see the ending. And if you are unskilled, you can either buy some. microtransactions or you'll find your way to the end another way but with these games it was like ha ha can you defeat me you know that was really the stance of gaming of that time yeah well it was such a kind of feast or famine situation compared to today right so today there's tens of thousands of games you could choose to play so a game that's deliberately trying to you know make it hard to finish

you know definitely attracts a certain kind of player but not everyone but in the early 80s you know each new computer game being commercially released was a rare gem, right? So people, you know, when you bought one of these games, it was expected that it might take you three or four months to play and figure out how to beat it because there wouldn't be another game coming out, you know, until until then. So there was definitely, you know, a different mentality. I think also too, because so many of the early computer users were sort of the classic hackers where they just really loved solving complex problems and fiddling around with things, a lot of the games were sort of designed for that kind of person to play and it wasn't really until computer games began

being played by a much broader selection of people that eventually people were like oh maybe not everyone loves being faced with these you know this is super hard stumpers as their recreational activity in the evening right right yeah yeah yeah I think we forget that in the past and some of us have lived through you know much earlier parts of the past but less things were competing for your time and some games are annoying to play today because is that could be your weekend. That could be a few months. But just looking at my,

I was just going through my Steam games today. It's like, how many Steam games do I have? Oh, 538 or something like that. So at any point, I could play one of 500 games. So if something is annoying me, I try to like just shake it off and move on to something else. But that was not the case back in this period of time. And it's interesting to see that like Roberta Williams,

influenced by Colossil Cave Venture. In fact, she's remaking it now, it sounds like, which could be interesting. She's influenced by that. She makes her games very difficult, very challenging. Ron Gilbert at Lucas Film Games, very annoyed by that sense of design. And he sort of creates the template

for what all graphic adventures would be expected to be. So there's just a chain of influence that's continually moving through history here. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and I think, so I had actually done an earlier book called Adventure Games Playing the Outsider. that was focused more on graphical games. And that was another thing I talked about in there

is that chain of influences. And graphic adventures, again, are kind of a genre that's perceived as mostly dead. But there are so many game genres that are still popular that descend from that. You know, everything from, you know, puzzle platform adventures to hidden rooms or escape rooms, right? Visual novels, you kind of mentioned earlier.

There's kind of half a dozen things that have these direct roots back to adventure games that are still being made. So a big argument I had in that book was, you know, looking at these genealogies and this chain of influences and especially given that so many game designers today grew up playing these games

it's actually really useful and important to look at how that style of game influenced what people internalized and the lessons people took to the next generation of games that came after sequelcast 2 and Friends looks at movies and video games and franchises a movie and game at a time.

Hosted by Matt Bradley Shurgy, Thrasher, and Alex Miller, been going since 2009, and were part of the HyperX podcast network. The award-winning Go Nintendo podcast is the best place to get the latest news on the world of Nintendo. We cover the biggest stories, share impressions of the latest games, and answer your burning questions. There's also some general pop culture talk, game music trivia, a heaping helping of silliness, And did I mention our robot companion? I'm the star of the show. Catch new episodes of the Go Nintendo podcast every Saturday on the HyperX Podcast Network.

Can you talk about the decline commercially of the genre? Because I hate to keep going back to Lucas Arts and Lucas Film Games, but that's just what I specialize in and what I've done the most research in. Ron Gilbert told me when I interviewed him a long time ago that the sales of adventure games never really changed. Just other things started selling a lot more. he basically said doom was the end of adventure games because doom was selling so much anything you made that sold an adventure game's amount of sales was not viable to your publisher was it the same for text adventures were they consistently selling the same but other games

were just selling more was that the case for them i think i think it was a little of each honestly so so there definitely are genres i think that have been sort of assumed by more popular genres so muds is another example of textine that talked about in the book multi-user or dungeons, which in the late 80s, early 90s, were pretty popular. They were kind of the precursors to, you know, modern MMRP style games. And they had a really dedicated devoted fan base. And if you kind of look at the numbers, it's not so much that that fan base went away. It's just that several orders of magnitude more people started playing graphical MMOs.

So, you know, things like Ultima Online and EverQuest came out and just kind of swallowed muds in terms of popularity. but there's still muds out there running with like hundreds of active players having a great time. It's just, you know, the scale changed, right? So text games in the 80s, I think, there was definitely some of that where graphical games just kind of had an inherently wider audience. But there also, I think, was, you know, that cultural shift I mentioned earlier where in the early 80s, if you owned a computer, you probably loved sitting down and playing these hard puzzle games. But by the early 90s, if you owned a computer, you might just be, you know, a regular person who, you know, didn't inherently have that mindset. So yeah, the audience definitely expanded. But I think a lot of people to sort of, you know, moved on to try different genres, right? Like they were sort of forced into Texas Adventure puzzle games because those were the only games being made at first. But then, you know, oh, look, here's a flight simulator. Here's the first person shooter. Here's a strategy game. The kind of scope of available games increased. And a lot of people naturally, you know, discovered, oh, that one of these newer genres was actually the kind of game they wanted to be

playing. So, so yeah, I think it was definitely a little of each. And obviously, you know, that wasn't the end, you know, when Infocom and other companies shut down. Because the 90s, despite the lack of commercial success for the genre, this is when it went underground, for lack of a better word. We have the beginning of the interactive fiction competition in 1995. That's when it began. And it seemed like, I guess, freed from the restrictions of having to sell a product. It felt like a new boom it looks like for interactive fiction. Can you explain what was happening in the 90s? Yeah, it's funny because in a lot of ways, like the best thing that can happen to a genre is for it to die commercially because then the people making

games and it can start asking all these questions other than what is the customer want, right? Like, what do I want or what, you know, what, what can this do that wouldn't necessarily sell but is interesting. So yeah, this thing you saw happen in the 90s is Infocom, which you mentioned, kind of the biggest American publisher of text games had got bought by Activision and basically shut down similar things that happened to most everyone else kind of producing that style of game and you know things like Doom came out and and games were increasingly kind of shifting in this more action focused direction and but there were still all these fans of old text adventure games and no one was making anything for them to play and they were pretty

bummed about it. So you saw these fans start gathering in online spaces. So originally places like CompuServe and AOL had forums for people who are fans of these games. Usenet news groups were a big place where people were gathering. And originally those communities were really kind of backwards looking and nostalgia focused. So just talking about, you know, what was your favorite Infocom game? You know, really looking more at the past. But a group of people started making tools to sort of reverse engineer old formats or create new languages that would let you compile to, you know, popular Texas Venture formats. And eventually this ecosystem sort of emerged by the mid-90s where it was actually possible to make a game that ran in the same engine as Infocom games had. And, you know,

with people who are sort of doing this in their spare time, unfettered by commercial restrictions, these games to get really elaborate and popular because people might spend years, you know, working on building their perfect game. And yeah, you mentioned the interaction. fiction competition, which lunched in 95, that became a big annual event where people would enter new text games to kind of show them off. And that, you know, at first there were kind of dozens of entries and eventually got up to, you know, over 100 entries in some years. And yeah, this really interesting kind of renaissance happened where people started questioning all these assumptions like, okay, well, what if what if you made a text adventure game that didn't have

puzzles, right? What if you made a text adventure game that, you know, unfolded in real time, rather than on a turn-by-turn basis. Kind of all these fundamental ideas, people started questioning them and exploring with what kinds of things worked and what kinds of things didn't. There was an event that ran that started a few years after IF comp

called the IF art show that basically asked people to make games kind of focusing on specific elements. So it had like a landscape category that was like make an interactive fiction game that's just about exploring an environment but with nothing else going on. There's no enemies.

There's no inventory items, right? It's just about an environment. And a lot of those experiments kind of presage things that happened in indie games years later. So the landscape category in that show in the late 90s was a lot like what walking simulators and mainstream games would develop 10 or 12 years later. So, yeah, it was just a really interesting kind of space where you had all these people who weren't having their needs met by what mainstream games commercially were doing, but just kind of decided to come together and start making their own stuff for their own amusement.

and a lot of those games ended up being really popular and influential. And what do you see, this is a very broad question, so I apologize, but what do you see as the state of adventure games in the 21st century? Just from my own perspective, it seems like everybody, mostly everybody can have access to a screen. We have lots of digital marketplaces. We have lots of ways to download games, lots of ways browsers have evolved to play games in them. What has the 21st century meant to this genre? So a really interesting move you've seen in the last 10 years, which is kind of maybe surprising on the surface, is away from complexity. So those 80s text games often had, you know, these kind of underlying what was called like a world model.

So there was a little simulation running of, you know, the locations, what objects were in them, characters moving around. You know, you might be simulating things like light and darkness and containers and, you know, maybe even things like how torches worked or the flow of water or, all of this little stuff. And the idea was that you sort of needed a foundation like that, this kind of simulated world, that you would then tell an interactive story on top of. And the fact that the world was simulated would maybe let the player, you know,

experience things in a different order. It could, the game could respond sensibly to different kinds of inputs about, you know, whether it would make sense to be able to touch a thing or pick up a thing or whatever. And that assumption really held for a long time in that community. But in the last time, or 15 years, you've actually seen a whole movement of people being like, maybe you actually

don't need that at all, right? Like maybe the most interesting thing about an interactive story isn't the world it's set in per se, or the simulation of that world, but rather like the choices the player can make within that world. So you've seen tools like Twine, which is a tool for making kind of more hypertext style text games where you're not interacting by typing commands, but by clicking on links. And in the early 2010s, Twine games kind of took over the whole interactive fiction scenes. So you went from seeing almost no games of that style in IFCOMP every year to within a couple years, more than half of the games entered every year being a twine style game. And it was really a movement saying, you know, it takes a lot of effort to set up that simulation to, you know,

understand not only how to, you know, get it running, but then to create a world that is consistently within that simulation. And all that's time you're not spending on storytelling necessarily, right? It's more this sort of like, you know, building the stage. And you saw this sort of whole new generation of creators saying, actually, you know, maybe what's under the stage isn't important. Maybe like what's happening on the stage is more interesting. And a real shift kind of more towards different kinds of experimental storytelling, different kinds of more character-focused stories because characters are something

that it's actually, you know, fairly hard to simulate well on a computer. So it's funny because in a lot of ways now, you know, we have these computers that are so much more powerful and so much more technically capable than what people had in the 70s and 80s. But artistically, the movement has actually kind of been not necessarily to use that power or maybe to use it for other things like, you know, presenting something beautifully or whatever. I think you, you know, it may well be that you'll see that shift back in the other direction at some point. But that's a really interesting kind of recent trend is, you know, once technology becomes more ubiquitous, maybe it's no

longer the most interesting thing to be experimenting with. Yeah, it sounds like the tools are very much available and fairly easy to use. So people that don't have an interest in, you know, making the simulation and just want to tell a story, an interactive story, they are able to tell their story without necessarily having to have a lot of expertise in game design of the older variety, it sounds like. Right. Yeah. And that's a huge part of that too, is it's kind of opened up the creation of those games to just a bigger swath of people than, you know, we're capable of using a more traditional programming language or had the, you know, desire even to do that. So, yeah, it's been really cool to see.

so that was basically the history of text adventures in about 20 minutes so I know in your 700 page book it'll be much more in depth but I guess the preview more of what is going to be in your very comprehensive book you sent me a few of the more standout and interesting games that you cover in 50 years of text games and I want to talk a bit about them here because a lot of these were very new to me including the Oregon Trail I think I did a podcast about MECC the Minnesota educational something something it's been eight years so I forget what the all the initial stand for but they created the version of Oregon Trail that every kid in the 80s played but I wasn't as familiar with the 1971 version and some of the some of the very fun facts about it like one of them is they deleted the source code when they were done because you know other people needed that space on the shared computing systems can you talk about how this evolved and how it's different from the graphical version. One thing I found, it feels like this has the first QTE ever in video games where you're literally typing in bang as many times as you can in order to hunt, unlike the Apple 2E version where you're piloting a stick figure around. Right. Yeah, it's an interesting story.

And I love the, yeah, the deleting old source code thing was so common. And it reminds me of things like, you know, the BBC just like wiped all the tapes with like the first 10 years of Doctor Who episodes because they hadn't yet realized that someone was going to care about those someday. And yeah, you definitely see the same thing in early computer games. But yeah, so the first version of the Oregon Trail was actually made by a student teacher. So he was, you know, finishing up college had gotten assigned with this class of junior high students in Minnesota. And he was really like actively trying to engage them. So he did things like he dressed up as Mary Weather Lewis to talk about, you know, the Lewis and Clark expedition and came to class in

character is Lewis and just really wanted to kind of like reach students and engage with them. And he, his, he had two roommates at the time who were also student teachers. And one of them had taken a programming class. And so they were going to cover the sort of Western expansion of the U.S. period. And he had this idea to make a board game based on that. And his roommate said, oh, well, your school has a computer, right? And that was, that was a big thing in the 70s. This was way before people had home computers. But there were. lots of initiatives and grant money to get, you know, computer access into schools to help, you know, students be part of, you know, the future. And so his roommate said, well, we could

actually do this on the computer and your students could play it, play the board game on the computer and it could do things like managed, you know, how much goods they have and how far they are without the students having to track that for themselves. So in the space of about two weeks, the three of them kind of hacked together this prototype game. And then they debuted it in his his classroom. But yeah, it had, as you mentioned, it had, you know, a sequence where

you have to hunt and the computer just measures how long it takes you to type the word bang to determine how good you do at hunting. So it was kind of a reflex-based, even in the very first text-based game, there was this, you know, reflex component already.

Yeah, and by all reports, it was sort of like wildly popular and students were like staying after classed. play again and it was a big success and then in years later the MECC as you mentioned kind of was a group that had formed to get educational software produced and into classrooms and the game got kind of recreated for that but yeah the original source code did not exist so basically the creator kind of just remade it from scratch based on his memories of how it had worked and even back in 85 we were doing HD remakes of games that's right even that early this one

has graphics. But yeah, very interesting that 71 original, you know, non-commercial version, 75, the text version released, and then 85 is the one that that became the iconic touchstone for late-gen-exer's

early millennials, and I'm sure traditional millennials probably played it on their aging Apple 2ies in class as well. So yeah, just everybody played it. It was the thing that was closest to a real video game for all of us that we could play in school. And also, another thing that I didn't know about was

we all are vaguely aware of or at least know of Lunar Lander and we've seen the Lunar Lander mechanics in countless other games so I think we're familiar with just piloting a thing that's floating around and we have to adjust the angles and adjust the retro rockets and stuff but originally

it was designed by a high school student in 1969 and it was a real-time Lunar Lander game with just 39 lines of code and apparently there were a lot of physics squeeze in that space. You mentioned it earlier where it's like turn-based as well. Like every turn is 10 seconds. It's very, very interesting and

very complicated. Yeah. So another thing in addition to playing the games that was really important to me for the series was whenever possible looking at their source code if it's been released because I just think that's such an interesting way to glean insights into what the designer was thinking and what the game is actually doing under the hood versus how you're perceiving and operating on the surface. And the source code for that original lunar lander game was some of the hardest I had to deal with because it was so, you know, 69, like you say,

it's so early on in the history of computers that the languages didn't have any, almost any of the sort of human readable conventions that we take for granted today if you're looking at source code. So very densely packed, which was a factor of there being a limited amount of storage space again. So trying to squeeze stuff into a small amount of space as possible.

But yeah, the kid who made that, the high school kid, his father was an engineer and he actually apparently sat down with his dad to work out the equations for, you know, falling bodies and thrust vectors and everything that would go into that. And, you know, the lunar landing was a nice sort of like instantiation of that because you didn't have all the complex things you get in an atmosphere like drag and, you know, all of the ways that stuff. You're just literally, you've got bodies in a vacuum, you know, in pure forces interacting. So yeah, it's simulated actually pretty comprehensively, you know, within the limitations of what it's doing, the physics behind that. Another thing I really love about that game is even though it's only 39 lines of code, like you mentioned, it has little touches of kind of humanity that try to make it more than just, you know, a game about math equations, right? So when it starts, it says lunar, control-calling lunar module, and so it's sort of setting up this premise, like you're actually talking to, you know, mission control via your teletite. And at the end, when you quit, instead of just terminating, like most programs would at that time, it actually prints control out first. So it's trying to maintain this nice little fictional illusion that you're not just typing in numbers.

You're actually an astronaut piloting the spacecraft and talking to mission control, which I think is really cool. Even in this game that is so numbers heavy to see that, you know, the author felt that like bringing you into that world, making a fictional world for you to feel like you were part of was like a really important part of that program for him. And again, that's that's 1969, I think, shortly after we landed on the moon. Yeah, yeah. Those computers got us to the moon, and these computers kind of try to simulate that as well. So it's happening before the 70s, which is something I don't even think about. It's very, very cool to see it's happening back then. You've also called out the original Dug and Crawler, D&D.

It was for a networked computer system called the Plato. It predates Rogue. and in this we see things that would become common in other games like spawn camping and bosses and by the way this is me reading the notes Aaron sent me I did not find this on my own so I don't want to take the credit but these are these are just the broad outlines of these interesting callouts from his book so can you talk about D&D like nonlinear gameplay it seems very ahead of its time and again it predates rogue which most people feels like here's the fundamental. Here's just a very fundamental game experience. Yeah, it's another really fascinating

game. So it's like, it's just the letters D&D. And there's an interesting story behind that, which I'll get to. But yeah, the Play-Doh system was super ahead of its time. So this was, you know, early 70s when it first came out. It had a 512 by 512 CRT touchscreen that could display text and graphics. It was designed to be networked with a bunch of other computers. So it supported multiplayer interactions and it kind of came out of this huge government grant which originated way back with sputnik actually so um the u.s government after sputnik became kind of terrified that u.s students were falling behind russian students and like science and math education so they just dumped a ton of money into developing like next generation you know uh how can we make sure american students

you know are going to be able to compete in the future so plato came out of this huge like multi-million dollar project to to build networked computers for for um you know school students and um so it had all these advanced features uh and of course immediately once students got access to them one of the first things they started to do was trying to figure out how to make them play games of course so you saw all these incredible things like um the plato computers had uh microfiche slide readers built into them so so teachers you know were supposed to be able to load slides and then the screens could show you know uh presentations some students figured out that you could

have the microfiche reader advance even if there were no slides loaded in it which would make kind of like a rumbling noise and flash the screen white as it tried to show the slide and so there was a space battle game where whenever you got hit it would trigger that command in the hardware

and the machine would like rumble and flash white like your ship was getting hit. Wow. There are these stories about these computer labs filled with people playing these games and all of these, you know, Play-O terminals are just like, you know, rumbling like a washing machine

and with, you know, like a shoe in it and flashing your screens. They were developing, like, haptic feedback or like the Rumble Pack for 30 years before we even thought about, or 25 years before we even thought about it. Yeah, that's really cool. And like, yeah, apparently just things that we think of as, you know, more modern game design ideas,

like non-linear, you have to, like, the goal was to get to the bottom of the dungeon, but you can go back, you can leave the dungeon, just these things that I think people, we forgot about, and then they were kind of reinvented, seemingly after they were initially conceived much earlier. Yeah, so, so yeah, so D&D was, you know, one of these Tolkien and Dungeons and Dragons

specifically influenced games that came out. It was actually dating it accurately was really interesting and it was close enough to the release of the original Dungeons and Dragons at the specific months that those things happened became important when I was researching. So within the first year of Dungeons and Dragons coming out was when this game came out. And yeah, it just, it pioneered a lot of cool stuff. stuff, it was trying to adapt Dungeons and Dragons to a computer, but, you know, make it work in that environment where you don't have a dungeon master, you don't have, you know, all of the

things you have access to sitting around a table. And yeah, it became crazy popular on Plato for a while. But one of the really interesting things about Plato was because it was this whole sort of like little isolated archipelago of computer stuff, right? It was developed in isolation for the specific purpose of going into classrooms. It wasn't really connected to any of the other computer research happening then. So the Plato network was an online, you know, pre-internet style network, but it was totally incompatible with the ARPA net, which was what the government was building and which evolved into like the internet we have today. And similarly, a bunch of stuff about how the hardware of Plato worked was incompatible with other kinds of mainframes

at the time. So all of these really fascinating influential older than the games appeared on Plato, but then they just sort of died out because they couldn't easily be ported to, you know, the computers that people were using five years, 10 years later. So that's kind of why, you know, you see, you know, Rogue named the rogue genre and is the most famous kind of ancestor of roguelikes. It didn't technically come first, but it was it was the one that could keep getting ported to more platforms and more and more people could become aware of it. And that's, that's really interesting to me how the, you know, the particulars of the platform you're working on can influence the way you're perceived by history, depending on how many people are able to continue accessing,

you know, the thing you made. Yeah, it sounds like D&D was its own Galapagos Island outside of the ecosystem of how these other games were growing. Yeah, totally. Yep. And something else you called out in your book, in your blog series as well, something I found incredibly interesting is Monster Island. This was a non-computer

interactive fiction game. I really want to dig more into this and read more about it in your book because I'm just thinking, like, how did this, how did this work? Because it was a play-by-mail game, one of many. And you basically turns

were processed in this game every eight business days and you could submit them by paper mail, fax or email and I was looking at the cost of this in 92 the cost per turn was $4. In 97 it was $4.50 per turn but the setup for the game

remained free. So this was a you know like an online MMO almost you're paying subscription fees in a way but it's all done on paper and big rule books, lots going on here like how was this managed, how was this played? just like thinking about how this all all this work together just kind of blows my mind.

Yeah, play by mail is such a fascinating genre that basically was completely killed by the rise of email and the internet because that just seemed superior to everyone. But it had its own kind of unique charms. And yeah, basically what it was is you were playing a computer game, but your interface to it was a pencil and paper. So the company running the game would have a big at the time, you know, expensive computer that had a persistent world with maybe thousands of characters and, you know, dungeons and huge. exploration, you know, areas to explore. And you would get a report of what had happened to your character in the, in the mail, in the physical mail, not email. And then you would fill out a turn, an order card with what you wanted your character

to do next and different games, you know, different genres had different kinds of things you could do, everything from, you know, like a mobster mafia game to, you know, controlling like a massive fantasy army and some, you know, fictional continent. And you would, you would sort of spend a while thinking through your next action. you might communicate with other players via postal mail or phone calls to coordinate strategies and then you would send in your turn card the computer would kind of process all these hundreds of turn cards update the state of the world generate new turn reports to mail out to people so it was a slow cadence of like once every seven days or 10 days or

something like that getting these turns process but because the the usually the company running the game could afford just much better hardware because they basically just had one computer that, you know, was running this whole game, the games could get a lot more sophisticated than early computer games could be. So yeah, you mentioned the rulebooks. Some of these games had rulebooks that were like inches thick, right? There were like hundreds of possible kinds of orders you could submit. The strategies for these games got, you know, just ridiculously complicated. So some of the fans sort of compared it to like, you know, a board game that's so complex it takes you a year to play in just sort of in the background of your life

as you're doing your other things every couple days, you sit down at your table to, you know, plan out your next move and this massive ongoing board game. In practice, this feels like just the same concept as cloud computing almost, where it's like, well, if you could play this at home, you couldn't afford the rig you need. So we'll do it all on our end for you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And we'll send you the results, basically. And like, today it's like, well, your switch can't run this game, but we'll do it for you and send you the video instantly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it's so interesting to me, because that genre kind of really did not leave, from my perspective, much of a mark in pop

culture consciousness, right? Like, I feel like most younger people today have never even heard of it. But it was really popular for a while, in a particular niche at least, as this kind of interesting, you know, form of computer enabled gameplay, right? Like, these games were too complicated that a human could have, you know, adjudicated them. That was one of these sort of many like early abandoned experiments and how computers might change the way we play games. Yeah, I mean, I'm 40 and I, this was new to me.

I had heard of things and like you would see it in old movies and read it in old books, like someone is playing chess by mail with an old friend or something like that, but I never thought like, oh, this could be much more expansive than just you know, I'll send you my next chess move on a postcard. Right, yeah. And then we have clicker games that are sort of redefining the idea of a text adventure game in the 2010s.

And that unlike, you know, go north, pick up this, you know, talk to this, you know, talk to this and it's all just clicking very simple commands without like all of what you think is necessary for a text adventure game and I think these these coined the idea of idle gaming yeah there's there's kind of a bunch of yeah there's kind of a bunch of overlapping terms here clicker games idle games incremental games that all kind of mean variations on on the same core thing but yeah yeah yeah and they seem to be like a parody of interactivity almost like after all of these years of you know the importance of the importance of you know the living breathing world we all must be a part of when we play

something like sky rim or elden ring uh it feels like uh like no here are one of two buttons to click on here's one button to click on but once you sit with these games for a while they reveal like an incredible amount of depth that you would not really think about in the first five minutes yeah it's it's funny because that genre really did start off as parody games that were basically poking fun at games where you know all you're doing is making a number go up but the really fascinating thing that happened was the people making these games discovered that like oh actually it is really fun just to watch a number go up like there's something really like fundamentally hardwired into us um about like you know feeling like we're achieving victories even if the victory is only watching a counter increase um and maybe not even necessarily you know because of something intelligent you did just because you clicked a button so it's yeah and some people have really gotten into the psychology of those games and and why they work and what they say about us um but i think from a from the perspective of this text games project it's interesting because it's um again it's it's sort of coming back to that thing of like you know

gameplay can be compelling even without flashy graphics even without you sort of any of the things we're used to games having like really just like some words and some numbers and some clicking can actually make something that thousands of people will spend hours a day playing if you sort of frame it right and you know give give people the right expectations going in it's mentioned the title of your book and I wanted to end on this as you know one of the final specific games we talk about but AI dungeon something that I was unaware of but if you if you just wanted to kind of tinker with the genre and just see the depth of it this is not necessarily a game that's like hand designed obviously based on the title but it's a great way to mess around

with the format it's very low impact uh it's open-ended no defined solutions just a countless amount of variables like you choose the genre you want to play in and you just kind of go from there and some of them let you choose like a type of person you want to be in that world and uh i was going on youtube and looking up like playthrues and whatnot and people have like created their own soundtracks like if you're playing this kind of mode put this on for for ambience and stuff like that. I want to know, like, your thoughts about AI Dungeon. It's, it seems to be growing.

It's all on your browser. And it just shows just how the pure depth, even when it's like procedurally generated that this genre can provide. Yeah, it was a really interesting kind of note to end the book on, I think, because it's just kind of another example of how this new technology has come out. And one of the easiest ways to play around with it is in a text-only environment, right? And that's kind of been the way a lot of new things have been innovated in over the years. So it's neat to see that happening again in the 2020s.

But yeah, AI Dungeon was kind of one of the first public-facing examples of some of the latest artificial intelligence technology around basically training an AI on huge amounts of data. So, you know, scraping all of Wikipedia or all of Reddit or something, getting just this massive corpus of data. And then saying, given this input, what would you expect to say, see come out of that. And sort of as we're recording this in the last few months, it's been actually really popular to see a variant of this with art. So a lot of AI generated art has really been, you know, making rounds on social media and things like that. But it's the same kind of core technology. Yeah. Those have been very fun to look at. Hopefully we're not all sick of them by the time this podcast comes out, but I've been having a lot of fun looking at the results

of those. Yep. But yeah, AI Dungeon is basically doing that for a big corpus of interactive stories and saying, okay, based on all of this training data, if I were to type, you know, hit the troll with the sword now, what would I expect to see happen? And it's, it's entertaining because it's sometimes, you know, totally bonkers and off the wall, but sometimes like weirdly compelling. And the speed at which the technology is improving is kind of like borderline frightening. Yeah. If you look at the differences between the first version of AI dungeon and, you know ones that came out six months later 12 months later 18 months later you just see this like market improvement and sort of the coherence of what you're eating back and how much it's remembering

past context and things like that so i think it's really interesting because it's not it's just a completely different approach than hand authoring a text game right it's it's basically asking this algorithm to dream things for you and and it's just kind of a black box right that as a designer you can't really control what comes in very much. But I just thought it was a great example of how, you know, 50 years later, we're still trying new things with text in, text out, with interactive text games. Yeah, there's almost a scary amount of possibilities with AI dungeon in that it was

one of the games I could tinker with because it was available for the sake of this podcast. After about 20 minutes, I had to say, no, I have to finish my outline because I was trying everything. And it's just like, oh, it can kind of, I have not stumped it yet. I have not done something that it couldn't figure out quite yet. And I'm sure, like you said, it is getting scary. Who knows how just deep and complex this will be in the future. But yeah, available to play online. And what exactly, what would you recommend people try if they're looking? Like, I'm a newbie to the genre, obviously, but I feel like AI Dungeon is a great place to see just the possibilities. But do you have any other recommendations like where should people go? What

should they start with? And again, the genre has just so many different ways to play. There's not one definitive experience it sounds like. Yeah, there's a lot. There's a lot of angles on this. One recommendation I like, which is kind of not a traditional game in this genre, is a game called Nested from, I think, 2011. And probably the easiest way to find it is if you Google 50 years of text games nested. You'll come up with my article on it. But it's a game that just starts off with a single word, which is universe, and it's got a little plus sign next to it. And if you click on that, it expands to a bunch of things like galactic supercluster, galactic supercluster with pluses. And you can click clicking and expanding and drilling down. And if you try it,

you want to keep going until you find an inhabited planet, because at first it might just seem that it's, you know, just this procedurally generated list of stellar phenomenon. But you can basically drill down into these civilizations with like thousands of people, who each have individual memories and thoughts. It's just, and basically you can just keep drilling down forever, right? You can drill down to the level of individual atoms inside someone's brain, and then inside the atom is a whole other universe.

So it's actually like a very small amount of code. I think it's something like maybe 30 or 40K of JavaScript code. It all runs in the browser. But it's so compelling because it creates this illusion that you're exploring, you're basically, you know, this godlike entity exploring an infinite number of universes that are all just rendered is this nested list of bits of text. So that's just what I'm really fond of as an example of something you can do with interactive text.

That would be trickier in other mediums. And you can also, I think a good way to just kind of see what's available out of like the nearly if an amount is like just look at the interactive fiction awards and see what is won recently or even in the past. Like what do you think would be an interesting way to play. I mean, I feel like they're respected and what they vet should be a fun experience. But obviously, it is daunting, especially if you're planning a podcast on something you've barely touched before. So I thank you, Aaron, for your expertise. And again, the guest has been Aaron Reed. The book is 50 years of text games from Oregon Trail, Tayai Dungeon.

Aaron, congrats on a very successful Kickstarter. Can you talk about some of the extras? You have different versions of this book coming out, and one of them has a lot of, like, a fun, like, physical extras to it, too. Yeah. So, yeah, there's a couple editions. there's a digital version. There's a soft cover and a hardcover. But yeah, so one of the things that I always found really charming

about the early period of those commercial text games is that some of the companies would, in the box that you would buy, include these little kind of extras called Feeleys that might have been like a printed map. They might have been like, you know, like one game from Infocom had like a magic rock that glowed when you touched it. And they were just kind of like ways of bringing you into the world more, right like you don't have graphics you don't have visuals but these were sort of tactile things that would help you connect to the world you were about to enter when you started playing the game so when i was thinking for this book about you know what were what would be some cool things i could have as rewards i thought well what's the kind of equivalent of that for like a book about this history right and i hit on the idea of it'd be cool if i could provide a way for people to like touch pieces of this computer game history so this this one i think it's the ultimate collector's edition has

this box of basically kind of little interesting tidbits from computer game history. So you've got there's a reproduction cassette tape of one of the very first adventure game releases because it was actually in the very first days came on cassette tapes because that was an existing analog technology that could be repurposed to store data. So I have this kind of exactingly made reproduction prop of one of the very first adventure game releases. There's like a real piece of computer punch tape from the 70s where binary data was encoded by punching little holes in pieces of paper tape.

There's a hint book with a secret decoder one. So this was another big thing in 80s games was getting hint books to solve the puzzles. So I have a little hint book that has at least one hint for all of the 50 games the book talks about. So yeah, it's just kind of a fun way to give you something you can like hold in your hands and connect to this history, which I'm pretty excited about. It looks very cool. I was tempted to back that version, but I will be moving soon. and I feel like when that time comes, I will resent every heavy object.

And you have, that book looks very bulky. And again, it's so comprehensive and I can't wait to dig into it. This conversation is just a preview of everything going on, all the in-depth detail. And I can't wait to dig into it once it's finally released. But thank you, Aaron, for being on the show. Do you have anything else you want to plug? Obviously, you have the Kickstarter for 50 years of text games. Do you have any online presence?

Anything else you're working on you want to plug? Yeah, I would just point people to my website is AaronA.reed. And you can find all my games and stuff I've made over the years there. And I'm on Twitter at Aaron A. Read. So, yeah, happy to have people reach out either way. Awesome. And, of course, this has been another episode of Retronauts. Thanks again for listening, everybody.

If you want to support the show and get all these episodes one week ahead of time and at free, please go to patreon.com slash Retronauts. Sign up there for three bucks a month to get that. But if you sign up for five bucks a month, you get two full-length bonus episodes every month and a weekly column and podcast by Diamond Fight. And we've been doing that exclusive tier for, I believe, a little, over two years now, so there's quite a few episodes you have not heard if you're not on that level. And of course, we are on the HyperX Podcast Network. You can find us on Twitter

at Retronauts. And I've been your host for this one, Bob Mackey. You can find me on Twitter as Bob Servo. And of course, I am part of the Talking Simpsons network as well. We cover shows like The Simpsons and King of the Hill and Futurama. And in the past, things like Mission Hill and Batman the Animated Series. You can find us online at patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons or wherever you find podcasts. And by the way, one last thing is that it was very hard to find music for a podcast about adventure games. So I was able to find one soundtrack, and that is the Saturn version of Zork. So if you're wondering, what am I listening to between snippets of conversation?

That is the Saturn soundtrack of Zork, and it was very hard to find. But thanks again for listening, folks. We'll see you again for another episode. Take care. I'm not Oh, Oh, Oh.

Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. And Oh.

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