The Wizard and the Princess? The line drawings did take a while. One of the few games I gave up very early on (games were too expensive to abandon!)
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Oh, that’s it! There was a desert scene with a snake or a lizard? And the drawings were so bad that it was hard to tell what they were. I remember something being under a rock that I thought was a hat, and it made me crazy. I don’t remember if I finished it, but probably not, since I must have been only 10 or 11 at the time.
Thanks so much for naming it!
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Here’s a question: who here’s first IF wasn’t parser-based?
I think my first IF would probably be Depression Quest, probably ~2013? but the first one that actually caught my interest was Harmonia. I played MUDs some before that, in high school, but it’d be hard to classify those as IF? I never cared for parser games, but MUDs are kind of different, since it’s much more about, like, combat.
I remember playing Paranoia on the command line. Does anyone remember playing that Choice based game? It was long time ago, so all text. In fact, I think it may be done by using bash select command. An interesting one, to be sure.
Sorry, Paranoia? Like, an adaptation of the role-playing game with Friend Computer? Surely not this Paranoia?
If somehow somebody made that Paranoia into a game that you could play on the command line I would 100% try it.
Yeah, that Paranoia setting. I dimly remember it. It was very light-weight – a short game-book sort of game.
It seems to be hard to track down. It was in the bsd-games package but “removed because of the lack of a clear licence”.
Hm, this looks right: GitHub - spkane/c-paranoia: The old paranoia game that was written in C from the BSD games package.
This is a solo paranoia game taken from the Jan/Feb issue (No 77) of “SpaceGamer/FantasyGamer” magazine.
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I’m pretty sure they weren’t my first, and I don’t recall any names, but there were a ton of choice-based BASIC games floating around in the late 70s/early 80s. Some didn’t even offer rudimentary graphics, only short descriptions and a menu of “What do you do next?” options.
It is vaguely disorienting that, according to this poll, a good ~40% of the people on this forum played their first IF game before I was born.
Same here, but make it 65%.
Not only that, I don’t think I have played an IF game published before I was born except for the Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (or as far as I got into that game, anyway).
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Yes, that’s it. It was very short-lived. I was wondering about it because it was darkly funny in all the right ways. I thought it would be more popular.
Not necessarily. It varies by MUD genre. For me playing MUDs back in the early 1990s - a LPMUD - it was more about solving quests and puzzles to reach wizard level. And then coding new quests in LPC - the very first interactive fiction I wrote.
For me MUDs are multi player text adventure games, which I think it would be hard not to argue for as a form of interactive fiction. True they are not the sort of narrative style favoured in choice based IF, but given the overlap of text adventures and IF I think the link is there.
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Thanks @nilsf … the Bunker is based on the world of Paranoia but also slightly different. I tried to make it a little more realistic in terms of personal relationships. Hard at work on a sequel which I hope to have ready for the fall.
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Honestly, all my early experiences were either CYOA paperbacks (including the Fighting Fantasy series) or computer games like Leisure Suit Larry, Hunt the Wumpus, and Oregon Trail.
I somehow literally never heard of Zork (to me, it sounded like Mork as in the Robin Williams show, which is why I didn’t pay any attention) until the 2000s, probably because I moved to Europe in the early 1980s and it wasn’t a thing over there. I probably tried my first parser game several decades after choice-type games.
I started with Adventureland on a friend’s Vic-20; this would have been the autumn of 1983. I remember we spent ages trying to move the bees in the bottle but they kept suffocating. We worked our way through the first 5 titles from Scott Adams which were the only ones from his canon that were released for the Vic at the time.
Just after this another mate of mine bought a BBC B (I had just bought an Atari 800 (48K, wow!) and we always argued over who had the better machine)). I recall he purchased Philosopher’s Quest which I think was Acornsoft’s first release and we got lost in the ME passages. He bunked off school the next day and came in on Monday morning with a newly drawn map of the area and announced he’d completed it.
Meanwhile I got hold of a dodgy copy of Savage Island Part I for the Atari but it kept crashing as home made copies tend to do.
And here I am 39 years later playing another game (Hezarin) from the same stable as Philosopher’s Quest…
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I am among 8% of those who started in the 2005-2009. Ditch Day Drifter by Michael J. Roberts was my first game.
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Have you played Return to Ditch Day?
A superb puzzler. One of the best I’ve ever played.
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Thanks, added to my list 
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The first text adventure game I ever played was Humbug by Graham Cluley. It was on a CD called something like The Complete Encyclopedia of Games, which was basically just a freeware compilation. I played about five minutes, said, “Wow, this is really boring,” and didn’t touch IF again until about 25 years later.
Which isn’t to say that Humbug is a boring game. I am sure it is very entertaining. I just wasn’t at a point in my life where I could appreciate playing a text adventure game over something like Doom or Duke Nukem 3D. Thankfully, I am no longer like that.
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I definitely encountered at least one text adventure as a child in the early 90s, though I couldn’t tell you which one it was (probably Zork or Adventure). I even remember trying to program one on an old Apple at my school, though I lacked the programming knowledge to get very far. My main exposure to the parser was through Sierra’s graphical adventures, which I grew up playing a lot of. Around 2004, I had my memory jogged by the parody game Thy Dungeonman on the Homestar Runner site, which I loved. Around 2010, I saw the documentary Get Lamp and learned that people had never stopped making these things! That really caught my attention and led me to play a few games and start planning my own.
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