It shouldn’t come as any great surprise that among the games built into Emacs there is a text adventure game called Dunnet.
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Does the Google text adventure easter egg count? It’s played in your browser’s developer console.
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When was that? I implemented a text adventure-like thing in the JavaScript console for a browser game I wrote a couple years ago but never ended up releasing. It’s one of those things where the basic idea is easy enough to implement (you’re basically just twiddling getters and setters on properties on the window object), but making it even remotely robust is tricky.
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It’s not quite within the scope of what we usually consider IF around here (more of a visual novel/point-and-click adventure combo), and IIRC it was also very short/pretty much just a proof-of-concept, but someone made a working Ace Attorney fangame in PowerPoint.
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It was around September 2018. I played it in Firefox and Chrome at the time. It doesn’t appear to work in the current version of Firefox, but it may still work in Chrome. It works (in a fashion) in Chrome v109.
Here are my instructions from the solution on CASA. You may need to adapt it for recent browsers.
Go to the Google home page and search for “adventure game” or “text adventure”. If using Google Chrome, right click on a blank space in the search results, choose Inspect from the shortcut menu and click the Console tab. If using Firefox, make sure the menu bar is visible and choose Tools > Web Developer > Web Console. When the script asks “Would you like to play a game?”, enter “yes” and the game starts.
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Cool. It looks kinda like what I did, only with a little less “interface” (I spent a bunch of time kludging together stuff to look like a status line and so on). I’ll have to give it a playthrough later.
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Here’s a really oddball one. ‘WWPL Adventure’ written by Andrew Hayward using Wordwise Plus for the BBC micro and published by Redwood Publishing in BBC Acorn User , issue 91, February 1990, pp. 25, 89–91.
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Some of what’s been discussed kind of slides into ARG territory with explorable web pages and many of us experiment with meta-elements. Excalibur emulates a Wiki and I’m sure there cool possibilities for research-based emergent narrative gameplay. I’m sure something like that has happened on SCP.
I like the idea of a cool emergent horror story that sneaks up on you while reading a hypertext documentation manual of an application or a phone or an IKEA bookcase.
I guess books don’t really count as an unusual medium for IF - basically ergodic literature - but I really like S. which is an annotated library book stuffed with feelies. Of course House of Leaves is well known. There’s also Trapped in Time which benefits from being printed out like an actual CYOA book.
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I remember in the old ComputerCraft mod for Minecraft, the computers used to come with a parser version of Minecraft installed on them.
That, or it was part of a custom OS someone made for the mod. It was a long time ago.
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If you class simple choice based stories as IF then there’s all sorts of hypercard and presentation tools that have been used to create simple games. My primary classes and I used to make quite long choice stores in simple html as well as in educational tools similar to powerpoint.
In the early 1990s in the UK, there were choice based adventures delivered over the TV network through our Teletext service, that took advantage of the four coloured “fasttext” buttons that were then included as standard on newer TV remote contols. You can play an example of one here…
http://www.castleteletext.com/pages/Page%20458.htm
It’s probably hard to appreciate how ubiquitous teletext was in the UK around then… Remember, this game would’ve been available in any UK household with a TV that had the slightly newer version of teletext built in. (Much of the teletext content is lost, but there are projects out there devoted to recovering the information from old videotapes of 1980s and 1990s TV programs… with a bit of clever computer processing, it’s possible to capture some of the teletext information that was being broadcast at the same time of the program.)
Even without using “fast text”, it was possible to program a simple interactive game in teletext by just using the basic page numbers; in the same way that the Fighting Fantasy & Choose Your Own Adventure books created their adventures; “go to page 366” etc. In the 1980s at school we had teletext creation software, as one of our standard education tools, so could make our own stories this way in our computing lessons. (Although we really should’ve been making more serious, educational content)
Getting more complicated, onto the parser side of things, there have been various implementations of IF & old text adventure games in Scratch, the educational block-based visual programming language for kids; which definitely wasn’t designed to do that sort of thing.
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I had an idea for a game that could be played in any text editor.
You have a document that seemingly describes a doomed space colonization project, terraforming project, or something like that. It ends up going wrong and the civilization never extends beyond earth… the last words in the story are “we ended up ignoring space altogether.”
So you then you use find and replace to delete all the spaces. With the spaces deleted, there is another hidden instruction to change the text again.
The end result would probably be sensible to the same extent palindromes are sensible though.
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Garry, today is actually Easter, so the like isn’t enough for my appreciation of your pointing to the Goggle easter egg… 
Today, let’s celebrate appropriately Easter talking about IF easter eggs in non-IF games, or even non-gaming programmes… 
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There’s a whole industry of this. Starting in 2017, for a couple years, I wrote and ran one about an organization dedicated to retrieving the stolen pieces of Albert Einstein’s brain. Came with escape room-esque puzzles, etc.
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I never managed to get this working in my Danish browsers. Has anyone managed to get this working in countries where English is not the official language?
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You need to change the Google language to English. Easiest way to do that is to open google.com in a private window, then using the language selection at the top right of the cookie prompt.
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There were these thoughts about writing an IF using OpenType (a font format) but I don’t know if it resulted in something playable.
There’s also this playable text adventure in the TypeScript type system (i.e. you play it in a code editor using its autocomplete feature).
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The most ridiculously constructed adventure game that I’ve ever seen was probably westley.c from the 1994 International Obfuscated C Code Contest. See westley.hint for a closer description.
It makes assumptions about your screen width (and probably tab width as well?), and modern C compilers may print more diagnostics than the author originally intended. So I’d suggest using the -fno-diagnostics-show-caret for GCC or the -fno-caret-diagnostics option for Clang. I don’t know about other compilers.
Sample transcript:
$ gcc -fno-diagnostics-show-caret westley.c
westley.c:87:10: fatal error:
You are in a debris-filled
dungeon; a door bars the
way, and sludge trickles into
a floor drain
: No such file or directory
compilation terminated.
$ gcc -Describe -Door -fno-diagnostics-show-caret westley.c
westley.c:36:10: fatal error:
The door is decorated with relief
figures of various dog breeds
: No such file or directory
compilation terminated.
There is at least one more adventure game winning entry, and another one that uses a reimplementation of Colossal Cave as its sample input. But I didn’t find them quite as ridiculous.
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wow, abusing C compilers… a first-rate feat of hacking !!
kudos to the author, whoever s/he is…
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
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On a nerd scale from 0 to 10 this a 12! 
Edit: Only coding it in BF might be even nerdier.
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The one entry I mentioned that used Colossal Cave as an example…? It’s not BF, but I still wouldn’t call the Unlambda version very readable: winner/2019/adamovsky at master · ioccc-src/winner · GitHub
According to GitHub - irori/advent-unlambda: A faithful implementation of the Colossal Cave Adventure in Unlambda it’s generated, not hand-written. So at least it’s not completely bonkers…
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