Dan Fabulich’s recent post about the The Horrible Rotten Dancing Dragon…Strikes!!! prompted me to add to IFDB the first type-in text adventure I came across, a thing called Return Of The Diamond. I’ve also written a short review.
Return Of The Diamond is pretty awful, really, and I don’t recommend you rush off and play it, but I do have a soft spot for it since it was the game that taught me the basics of programming a text adventure. In time I found other type-in games in magazines and gradually replaced the parser and other functions with better examples. I still remember the pride I felt when I figured out how to make the parser take four words instead of two!
I’ve added the game to my list of all the games I owned as a teenager. It’s a work in progress, as there are still a few more to add.