As a kid, the first text adventure I encountered with "The Cave" a text-choice game created by another student in the same town I lived. Our common teacher had created a "Computer Club" newsletter, to share programs between schools.
Then at a junior college I encountered Adventure, Zork (the full version), Mystery Mansion, and Warp on an HP 3000/terminal mini-computer system.
I began writing text adventures myself, bigger and bigger, and with higher and higher ambitions in terms of complexity, story and world scope, parsing. My "Command English" parser was an incredibly versatile subset of English.
At home I had an IBM Jr (Hey, I loved it!), whose BASIC didn't have GOSUB, so I invented a stack for the parser using strings. (Used strings as a heap in another program to create a very slow 3D vector graphics program.)
In high school I wrote this massive text adventure called Wanderer. I was so proud of it, until the day I went to save it on my floppy disk, at which time it wrote all over the previous version only to abort because it was to big for the disk. No pre-write size check! :(
That was the last one I wrote. But by pushing every text adventure to new levels of capability, over and over, I learned a lot about programming, and developed a habit of innovating in program styles, and domain languages, to match problems.
I wish I had the source for all those programs, but these were the days of many incompatible computers, and storage media that decayed quickly.
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I would love a Mac version of those four text adventures mentioned above. Mystery Mansion seems to have become particularly forgotten.
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"The Plot of the Phantom" makes me so happy! Thank you Scott Andrew!!!
(Completely random, but reading the opening scene, it struck me how perverse it would be to get deeply into the game and find out I was in the text adventure equivalent of "Deliverance"! That would almost be art, lol. Like novels, text adventures are a medium that naturally supports much greater freedom, than visual mediums.)