A Requiem for Text

In 1982, when I was still a couple of years away from owning my own computer, I spent a really embarrassing amount of time sitting in my room pouring over computer magazines, lusting after everything I saw: Commodore VIC-20’s, Apple IIe’s, Atari 800XL’s … all the old classics. I was a complete junky. I’d read the magazines into glossy tatters, and then pulverize them and snort the remains.

Unfortunately, none of this deeply distburbing monomania was being spent on anything useful: I wasn’t acquainting myself with the inner workings of the machines, or laying the groundwork for a career in the field, or turning myself into an indomitable computer god. I was mostly reading about games. Text adventure games, specifically: interactive tales of derring-do, in which you, mild-mannered computer nerd, were thrust into one perilous situation after another and forced to assume the mantle of a wizard, or a detective, or a privateer, and type your way past trolls and grues and dragons and mazes and all manner of insanely difficult puzzles.

I think I would have been even more intrigued by these games if I’d known how difficult they were to code. There was a time when .5 MHz and 2K of memory was state of the art, and any program you wrote had to work within those boundaries. It was sort of like trying to wedge a grand piano into an envelope, or write a novel on the back of a stamp. Skilled as those early programmers were, something had to give.

That something was usually the games’ parsers, whose job it was to interpret the commands that the players typed in. Most of the early parsers only accepted two words at a time, and you’d often spend as much time trying to phrase your command so the computer would understand it as you did figuring out what the command should be. A representative sample:

You see before you a long curving staircase. There is blood on the staircase. There is a painting of a vampire werewolf duchess on the staircase. There is a lantern here.

> Take lantern.

Taken.

> Turn on lantern.

I don’t understand.

> Activate lantern

You can’t do that with a lantern.

> Make lantern not be off anymore

You can’t not be off anymore the lantern.

> Break lantern

Everything goes dark. You are in grave danger.

> You mean the lantern was on the whole time? You son of a bitch!!!!

You are unable to mean the lantern was on the whole time you son of a bitch.

> Unbreak lantern

Something lunges out of the dark and eats you. You are dead.

> If you don’t bring me back to life right now I’m going to rip you out of this computer and tear you into little shreds so help me God.

You can’t rip you out of this computer shreds so help me God. You have scored 0 points. You are a Rank Charlatan. Press (R) to restart, (Q) to quit, (L) to load a saved game.

But the parsers improved over time, until, in the golden age of text adventures, when Infocom was churning out one superlative title after another, you could type long sentences in plain English with a reasonable expectation of being understood.

All that’s gone the way of the dodo now, alas. Text games are still out there, but only as a fan-sustained genre; all of today’s adventure games are slick multimedia packages, with lovely graphics, atmospheric sound, and non-textual, point-and-click interfaces.

I think that’s kind of sad. I like the pictures ok, but I prefer the ones I used to make up in my head.