History Main / InteractiveFiction

The obvious reason why they were in text form is that was the only means of output available. Original Adventure was written in the programming language FORTRAN and was designed to run on the UsefulNotes/MainframesAndMinicomputers of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Graphics output wasn't possible because most places had no systems available for on-screen graphics. It was only when computers that could display color graphics became affordable in the early 1980s that the text adventure started to be replaced by various programs that used graphics capability; a few text adventures were remade in graphical form at this time. (In non-English-speaking countries, graphical adventures had far more success in the 1980s than text-only adventures, which were rarely translated and thus posed a formidable language barrier.) Many text adventures were promoted with the concept that the player's imagination was capable of producing far more extravagant and realistic images than were possible on computers of the day. And even when graphical adventure games and [[RolePlayingGame RPGs]] began to appear, text adventures were allowed to be more complex and wide-ranging than the graphical versions due to text taking up far less limited disk space and memory than graphics and sound.

* ''Website/WritingDotCom''

** For example, "[[http://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=ii0k5l53vhghqyh6 Broken Legs]]," the second-place game in the 2009 UsefulNotes/IFComp, was cruel, but "[[http://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=jf5zkjj3jqfllwcn Rover's Day Out]]" and "[[http://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=3oez457dpng7ktzb Snowquest]]," the first- and third-place games, were both polite in that any death could be undone. In fact, most of the latter two games are merciful, in that you can't do anything to prevent yourself from being able to reach the ending.

* UsefulNotes/InteractiveFictionCompetition

** ''WebOriginal/TurningThePage''

** ''WebOriginal/GasStationAttendant''

This is a "video" game genre. Contrast {{Gamebooks}}, which may be the "tabletop / literary" version, or InteractiveComic, which extends this trope to {{Webcomics}}.

Interactive Fiction was once the industry standard for long-form narratives now implemented in computer {{Role Playing Game}}s, but fell out of commercial viability during the late 1980s as text parsers were rapidly displaced by icon-and-menu and PointAndClick interfaces. Shortly after the major players disappeared from the market, a lively amateur scene sprung up on the Internet, centred around the Interactive Fiction Archive (http://www.ifarchive.org ) and the UsefulNotes/{{Usenet}} newsgroups rec.arts.int-fiction and rec.games.int-fiction, thanks to the appearance of good-quality programming tools that have allowed recent amateur efforts to equal or exceed the quality of commercial games from the heyday of the genre. An annual contest sponsored by the community typically draws more than 20 entries per year, and the hobby continues to evolve and improve.