[HN Gopher] The Rise of Computer Games, Part I: Adventure
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The Rise of Computer Games, Part I: Adventure
Author : cfmcdonald
Score : 124 points
Date : 2025-12-13 20:19 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (technicshistory.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (technicshistory.com)
| reactordev wrote:
| Some fantastic text adventures can still be had online. There are
| MUDs (my favorite), Roguelikes, Sims, and even cyberpunk
| adventures. A half dozen Star Wars ones as well.
|
| This was peak 1986. A few years later and we'd be jumping a
| little pixel plumber on cathode ray tubes.
|
| Can't wait for the next part...
| ktallett wrote:
| Text adventures whilst sometimes infuriating, if played as they
| are meant to be back when released with a piece of graph paper to
| help map out where you have been and where you go, there is still
| some magic about them that isn't had with graphical games. Every
| room becomes exciting which just isn't the case even in my
| favourite games such as Fallout New Vegas. Oh more bottle caps
| again in a drawer but I can begin to tell what rooms will be
| essential to look in and which won't buy the middle of the game.
| There is none of that in text games, you just have to explore and
| get truly lost, another thing that is much harder to do nowadays.
| glimshe wrote:
| One of my dream games is a truly open world text adventure. I got
| a glimpse of it by having ChatGPT run this game, but it started
| hallucinating and misremembering after a few rounds. It has to be
| _perfect_ to avoid breaking the immersion, but I 'd pay $100 for
| such a game even without graphics.
| hackshack wrote:
| You're on to something. I tried this too, a few months ago,
| with offline Ollama/Magistral on Mac. "You're a dungeonmaster
| for a single player adventure game, with me as the player..."
|
| It lost track of things almost immediately. But the foundation
| was there.
|
| Maybe if we had a MUD-tuned model...
|
| If it has an approximate way to track state, and a "pre-
| caching" method where it can internally generate an entire town
| all at once, room by room, so hallucinations are rarer...
| actually starts to sound like a traditional DM's method of
| world building for a campaign.
|
| Maybe something like an LLM-assisted Inform (interactive
| fiction engine). https://ganelson.github.io/inform-website/
|
| Side note: been playing Aesir, then the Aesir 2 MUD since 1994.
| It's still up!
| c22 wrote:
| Maybe you could ask an LLM to build a campaign then ask
| another one to run it.
| TylerLives wrote:
| Instead of relying on the model's memory alone, you could have
| it read/write to a file.
| alisonatwork wrote:
| Isn't this what MUDs are? I tried a few in the early days of
| the internet and even back then they were like much bigger and
| more dynamic versions of text adventures of the 80s. For me I
| bounced off the idea that I had to role-play with other humans
| - I thought it was far more interesting to chat with other
| humans about real-world topics - but if you are looking for a
| large, text-based role-play experience then it's probably worth
| trying out a few. There might even be some that can be soloed
| these days, there are so many.
|
| I think the challenge of trying to make an "endless" game using
| an LLM is the same challenge that all procgen games face - they
| are boring for people who are seeking a well-paced narrative.
| There are players who enjoy the mechanics of
| looting/crafting/trading/etc who will gladly play games where
| the story is incidental or emergent, but if you're specifically
| looking for something with a bit more narrative depth, I'm not
| sure procgen will ever work. Even if there is a system that
| tries to project coherent storylines onto the generated world,
| you still need the player to do things that fit into a
| storyline (and not break the world in such a way that it
| undermines the storyline!), otherwise the pacing will be off.
| But if the system forces the player into a storyline, then it
| breaks the illusion that the world was ever truly open. So you
| can't have it both ways - either there is a narrative arc that
| the player submits to, or the player is building their own
| narrative inside a sandbox.
|
| AAA games try to have it both ways, of course, but it's always
| pretty clear when you are walking through procgen locations and
| leafing through stacks of irrelevant lore vs when you are
| playing a bespoke storyline mission that meaningfully
| progresses the state of the world.
| shevy-java wrote:
| > chat with other humans about real-world topics
|
| You can do this with regard to a MUD too, but typically out
| of character and not every MUD would allow OOC chatting
| within the game world, as that is disruptive to those players
| who seek immersion.
|
| It seems to me as if you may not have found a good
| roleplaying MUD back when you played MUDs. You may be missing
| out on that experience. I retired from playing MUDs about 11
| years ago permanently, but the in-world roleplay was the only
| thing that was interesting to me since it was the creation of
| a unique storyline potentially involving many other
| playercharacters.
| alisonatwork wrote:
| I think I just don't really vibe with roleplaying in
| realtime with other humans, to be honest. I grew up trying
| to play tabletop RPGs (my dad was a DM and used D&D
| mechanics as a way to make storytime more engaging), but
| while I really enjoyed making up characters, I never had
| much fun actually doing a campaign.
|
| The thing I love about computer games is that I can go
| through them at my own pace, pause whenever I like, hang
| around looking at a cool visual, go back to an old save and
| try something different, whatever. Multiplayer takes all
| that freedom away because everything has to progress on
| somebody else's timetable, which isn't as fun for me.
| Nowadays being expected to perform on a time limit just
| reminds me of work, which is the last thing I want when I'm
| playing a game.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| What I wanted in MUDs was a simple editor to allow people
| with little technical skill a means to create a world--or
| extend an existing one. And then I wanted a way to join MUDs
| together--like if you leave a forest by a certain path you
| are, unbeknownst to you, rerouted to a different MUD that
| picks up where the forest left off.
|
| In this way I imagined in time a world larger and richer than
| any that had come before it--where you could really just keep
| going, keep playing, never see all of it.
| alisonatwork wrote:
| I never got deep into it, but I remember reading magazine
| articles back in the 90s that that's exactly what the new
| generation of MUDs were. Wiki has pages on MOO, TinyMUCK,
| MUSH etc - these are basically platforms where the players
| themselves can expand out new objects and locations,
| presumably in a similar way to Second Life or other MMO
| sandboxes do today.
|
| So the tools already exist, but it seems to me that they
| primarily appeal to a very specific type of gamer, one that
| doesn't have much overlap with the type of gamer who would
| like an "endless" open world or the type of gamer who would
| like a tightly-plotted narrative experience. I think it's
| more something that appeals to fans of table-top RPGs,
| people who are looking for a collaborative storytelling
| environment.
|
| I think many gamers have the imagination of an epic
| infinite metaverse style game, but then when they actually
| get the opportunity to participate in one, it turns out
| that that's not really what they wanted after all, because
| it requires a level of creative labor that they weren't
| expecting. This is why I think the market has naturally
| segmented into sandbox builders, survival/roguelikes,
| traditional narrative adventures etc.
| egypturnash wrote:
| My experience was that in practice all that mapped-out
| world of most social mu*s was largely ignored by players;
| they'd all end up in a few gathering spots, or in private
| spaces disconnected from the main map, open only to their
| owners and people they teleported in.
| breve wrote:
| > _What I wanted in MUDs was a simple editor to allow
| people with little technical skill a means to create a
| world--or extend an existing one._
|
| Those are MOOs. They're fully programmable in MOO code.
| Here's the original MOO: https://lambda.moo.mud.org/
|
| There's no point to a MOO other than to be itself, although
| LambdaMOO does have an RPG system in it you can play:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LambdaMOO
|
| Server resources: https://www.wrog.net/moo/
|
| Programmer's manual: https://www.wrog.net/moo/progman.html
|
| yduJ's venerable duck tutorial:
| https://jkira.github.io/moo-cows/docs/tutorials/wind-up-
| duck...
| glimshe wrote:
| MUDs are a low-tech version of what I'm describing. It relies
| on other people being available and generally leverages the
| usual tropes with repetitive killing-based gameplay.
|
| LLMs are limited today, but one day they may be able to
| provide the well-paced narrative you're talking about. The
| LLM would be a skilled fiction writer that would introduce
| interesting events as I explore the world.
|
| If I decide to go to a bar and talk to random strangers, it
| could give me interesting life stories to listen without any
| action. But, suddenly, a mysterious man walks in, gives me a
| sealed envelope and departs without saying a word... What is
| in the envelope?
| miki123211 wrote:
| It is my understanding that muds (and all the flavors of Mush
| in particular) can sort-of do it, by letting players create
| their own story through roleplay, supported by an extremely
| open (and often player-modifiable) world, as well as good
| admins / GMs.
|
| That is more like "computer tabletop", however, and doesn't
| scale beyond a small number of players.
| mynjin wrote:
| Would Avalon count?
|
| https://www.avalon-rpg.com/intro/mud
| glimshe wrote:
| I've never played Avalon but it looks like a better text
| adventure. I'm not talking about hardcoded or randomized
| worlds, but truly reactive worlds.
|
| In my experiment with ChatGPT, I was walking around in a
| museum (that was the scenario) and decided to flirt with a
| woman who happened to be there. The flirting was something I
| decided to do on the spot with no prompting from the AI. The
| woman had just been part of the room description up to that
| point. But it reacted to this new situation in a semi-
| realistic way, essentially creating a new "adventure" on the
| spot. I met her on the next day, brought a gift (and so did
| she), but then it started hallucinating... :(
| thom wrote:
| Would D&D not work for you?
| glimshe wrote:
| It did for a long time, but depending on busy friends makes
| it so I can't play this whenever I want. My "dream" game is a
| single-player game I can play as many times I want without
| having to rely on others.
| itomato wrote:
| I wonder how a book of type-in AI prompts would do...
| nottorp wrote:
| ... with generative "AI" being nondeterministic, it will be a
| different experience for every "player".
|
| Sometimes it will even match what the prompt author intended.
| griffzhowl wrote:
| There was a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy text adventure, with
| writing from Douglas Adams. It's entertaining, but insane what
| you have to figure out to get the babel fish...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_th...
| stevekemp wrote:
| There's a good three-part writeup starting here, covering
| Douglas and the game:
|
| https://www.filfre.net/2013/11/douglas-adams/
|
| For my money the "best" adventure game was and is The Hobbit,
| but that may well be because it's the first one I was haunted
| by.
|
| Similar two-part writeup starts here :
|
| https://www.filfre.net/2012/11/the-hobbit/
| glimshe wrote:
| The Hobbit had randomness and emergent gameplay in ways that
| even Infocom didn't quite reproduce. A classic.
| WillAdams wrote:
| For a fascinating insight into "The Colossal Cave Adventure" see
| the Literate Program version of the source:
|
| http://literateprogramming.com/adventure.pdf
| cmos wrote:
| I loved this game. I want to make it into a mud.
| shevy-java wrote:
| I guess nowadays nobody would want to play e. g. King's Quest and
| what not, but in the 1980s or so that was novel and creative.
| Today the games tend to have powerful 3D engines, but the
| creativity was lost for the most part. Sometimes there is still
| innovation (Little Nightmares brought something new to the table,
| for instance) and of course the graphics and sounds are great,
| but something is gone now. In part this may be me getting older,
| but in part I also think that the whole computer game segment got
| much more boring over time.
| shmerl wrote:
| People play such games today too.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| When the first-person shooter arrived, somehow we collectively
| decided that's what _all_ games should now be.
|
| I think we've learned that creativity comes from constraints.
| Early computing platforms certainly were replete with that.
| egypturnash wrote:
| I've never been into Doom clones (to use the term from back
| in the day) and yet I have enjoyed playing countless video
| games from about 1984 through to the present. Very few of
| them are first-person games, whether they're head-clickers or
| other forms of first-person gaming.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| To be sure, all games are not FPS. But you know, what are
| the so-called "AAA" game companies constantly grinding
| out...
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| It might be that they're targeting the 8 - 18 year old
| boy demographic, and that's always a huge cash cow,
| whereas older gamers have refined taste but don't spend
| that much money on games because they don't spend that
| many hours on gaming
| Apocryphon wrote:
| AAA companies might pump out a lot of FPS- though it's
| arguable that they also grind out all sorts of other
| reliable and less-than-groundbreaking genres, from flavor
| of the decade trends (MMORPGs/MOBAs/live service battle
| royales/extraction shooters) to annual sports titles to
| Assassin's Creed sequels. The Call of Duty machine aside,
| I'm not sure if FPS is as much of a cash cow as it used
| to be.
|
| And if you look at this best-selling video games list,
| there's only a single FPS in the top ten (PUBG, which is
| technically also third-person):
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-
| selling_video_gam...
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Adventure games became FPS as early as 1992 (only one year
| before DOOM, so maybe I'm not making much of a point here)
| with the coming of Ultima Underworld.
| ido wrote:
| Wasn't UU an RPG rather than an adventure game?
| Apocryphon wrote:
| That's a fair point. I suppose if I wanted to focus on
| the first person perspective I could have mentioned Myst
| coming out the same year as DOOM, though I doubt it was
| even the first FP adventure game.
| anthk wrote:
| UU was an RPG. What adventure games became were either full
| hybrid 3D mechanics (Tomb Raider) and niche point and click
| ones.
| nottorp wrote:
| Tomb Raider isn't an "adventure" game, no matter what the
| "mainstream gaming press" says. Monkey Island is.
| anthk wrote:
| It was a real time action-adventure game with puzzles. TR
| made point and click adventures obsolete as they drove a
| puzzle-event bound game with free exploration. OTOH, text
| adventures would still be featureful and playable as they
| achieved incredible things very expensive to do with
| graphical games.
| jhbadger wrote:
| If Tomb Raider is an "adventure game" so is Donkey Kong.
| Tomb Raider is basically a platformer like Donkey Kong
| but in 3D. Neither made actual adventure games "obsolete"
| because taxing your hand-eye reflexes is a different sort
| of fun than taxing your brain.
| anthk wrote:
| TR has more to do than platforming, and more convoluted
| puzzles than DK.
| anthk wrote:
| Also, definitively, what killed the adventure genre would
| be the PS1 survival horrors. You have everything there:
| items, combinations, loads of puzzles, action and a
| shitfed perspective. Silent Hill, Resident Evil, Parasite
| Eve...
|
| Pretty much _the_ definition of an old 'point and click'
| aventure with action points.
| nottorp wrote:
| Alone in the Dark predates those by like 4 years
| though...
| Apocryphon wrote:
| It does and there were also plenty of horror adventure
| games, but Alone of the Dark would also make the jump to
| RE-style survival horror.
| finaard wrote:
| Almost none of the FPS shooters try to to something creative,
| though. Duke Nukem 3D is still unbeaten for fun in
| multiplayer (and we still get it out now and then for that)
| with simple gimmicks like the holo duke, pipe bombs and laser
| mines.
|
| Even just looking at "game uses 3D engine" we don't really
| have many great things. There's portal, and while some of the
| other stuff have promising ideas (like infinifactory), for
| all of them the controls tend to get in the way of fun.
|
| For ease of use and fun pretty much all simulations - even as
| far back as the 90s - just using isometric projection are
| still unbeaten by attempts to go full 3D.
| maccard wrote:
| Here's the highest rated games on PS5, Xbox and switch this
| year. There is _one_ first person shooter in the top ten of
| all three of these lists combined
|
| [0] https://www.metacritic.com/browse/game/ps5/all/current-
| year/... [1] https://www.metacritic.com/browse/game/xbox-
| series-x/all/cur... [2]
| https://www.metacritic.com/browse/game/all/all/current-
| year/...
| alisonatwork wrote:
| I agree that mainstream games tend to feel more predictable in
| their mechanics than what we got in the 8-bit era, but I'm not
| sure that that means they're more boring. There were a lot of
| crap games that came out in the old days that only seemed
| interesting at the time because our access was so limited.
| Nowadays anyone can play thousands of games for free, on pretty
| much any device, so they can choose to spend their time in the
| kinds of games that they actually prefer.
|
| I'm not sure it's worth lamenting that the most popular games
| today tend to have addictive mechanics and otherwise little
| novelty. Clearly that's what people enjoy. If you are
| interested in experimental or avant garde games, then that
| stuff is still out there in the indie scene. Lots of them are
| bad games, but they still might be good ideas.
|
| There's plenty of examples I am sure people can share on the
| thread, but here's one that comes to mind for me as interesting
| but not very fun: Bokida - Heartfelt Reunion. It's a gigantic
| monochromatic world with impenetrable puzzles and weird
| geometry that reminded me of those old freescape games like
| Driller. I don't think I enjoyed it very much but somehow I did
| play it all the way through and it still sticks in my mind
| today because no other game I played really did the same stuff.
| But, then, it's possible that that's just my subjective
| experience and for someone who plays Minecraft or something
| similar, Bokida was just derivative and forgettable? I dunno.
|
| There's a lot out there, though. I think we're in a golden age
| of games! As a kid I could never have imagined having a literal
| "backlog" of dozens of games I've already bought but not even
| started yet because there's so much to play.
| vunderba wrote:
| It's less mainstream, but there are still a lot of good
| adventure games released in the indie scene. The Crimson
| Diamond released last year got a lot of good press and is a
| text parser + graphical adventure game with an EGA style
| palette.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crimson_Diamond
| ido wrote:
| I think it's mostly that you're no longer interested in
| computer games and as such aren't aware of what's currently
| available. IMO there has never been a bigger and more varied
| supply of good games as there are today, in pretty much every
| genre (my personal taste is mostly for small indie games, not
| AAA). I started playing computer games in the late 1980s myself
| and have never stopped.
| Tuna-Fish wrote:
| 100% agreed. The golden age of gaming is right now,
| Kickstarter and Steam have opened up the field to smaller
| studios in a way that has never happened before.
|
| The biggest, most advertised titles are often very good-
| looking and very "bubblegum", for the exact same reason that
| the most popular genres of pop are like they are. To appeal
| to the widest audience, you have to file off all the sharp
| corners, and if that's the market you see then modern games
| can seem soulless.
|
| But that's not all of the market! No matter what genre you
| are interested in, there's probably more work ongoing in it
| and better games coming out right now that there ever has
| been in history. Most of them are less refined and sell a lot
| less than the mainstream games, but occasionally one succeeds
| well enough to expand past the small niche audience, which
| inevitably brings a lot more people into the niche, followed
| by imitators which grow the niche.
| 1313ed01 wrote:
| I feel like the indie-games are almost as clustered in
| small areas of potential "game design space" as AAA-games
| are, but just clustered in different areas, in particular
| around "games inspired by ha handful of SNES games and
| early Playstation JRPGs" (and maybe a tiny amount of vague
| Rogue-like-likeness). If you read much about old games
| (e.g. [1]) it is obvious that the history of games is full
| of evolutionary dead-ends and forgotten mainstream games
| (and entire almost-forgotten mainstream genres).
|
| [1] https://www.cgwmuseum.org/
| sillyfluke wrote:
| Yeah, it's hard not to consider the runaway success of
| games like Stardew Valley as counterexamples to the idea
| that the creativity is completely gone. But you wouldn't
| blame someone if they superficially looked at
| screentshots and thought it was a run of the mill retro
| pixel game. But it's wild to me that there are people who
| come from broken homes or rough childhoods who say the
| game was literally therapy for them and showed them a
| vision of domestic life or human interaction that they
| could realistically replicate or at least shoot for in
| real life.
| Marazan wrote:
| Stardew Valley is HarvestMoon++
|
| It is a lovely, very enjoyable game but it is
| _incredibly_ derivative.
| II2II wrote:
| I'm currently playing a game that is a blatent rip-off of
| Stardew Valley to the point where I frequently question
| why they were so obvious. (Or maybe those elements are
| rip-offs of Harvest Moon, I haven't played Harvest Moon
| to know.) Still, it's enjoyable. The design elements and
| places where it does diverge from Stardew Valley make it
| more enjoyable in my opinion.
|
| As the saying goes, "good artists borrow, great artists
| steal."
| Marazan wrote:
| Harvest Moon defines the "Turning round a dilapidated
| farm in a small village where you give everyone gifts all
| the time" genre. It all comes from there.
|
| EDIT: Stardew Valley has so many QoL improvements over
| harvest moon though. The early HM games are punishing.
| Tuna-Fish wrote:
| > I feel like the indie-games are almost as clustered in
| small areas of potential "game design space" as AAA-games
| are, but just clustered in different areas, in particular
| around "games inspired by ha handful of SNES games and
| early Playstation JRPGs
|
| Huh? That is also an artifact of what kind of games you
| follow. Just of the top of my head: -
| colony sims - strategy games
| (tactical/operational/grand-, with rt, rt+pause,
| turnbased options for each) - racing games -
| 4x games - flight sims - spaceflight sims
| - rpgs - survival games - shmups/ bullet hell
| - roguelike/roguelite - exploration - rhytm
| games - horror - factory builder / management
| sim
|
| are all having a great time.
| fragmede wrote:
| Monkey Island. The difficulty of the first game and the
| difficulty of the last game. The last game was still a game,
| but the challenge wasn't there. It just wasn't there. We
| might as well just be playing Progress Quest.
| mancerayder wrote:
| Monkey Island 1 and 2 have deep memories for me. I'll never
| forget playing Monkey Island 2 during a cold Christmas when
| I was a kid. The PC speaker music was great (King's Quest V
| was my other present and I still remember the opening
| music). One day I got the Sound Blaster on my 486 SX and it
| blew my mind.
|
| The Monkey Island that came out a few years ago sadly felt
| like a puzzle-free story for children and their parents to
| sit together to play. Elaine lacked humor and cynicism,
| there was a child's voice in some of the narration, the
| graphics were strangely cubic and stylistic instead of
| warm, and the characters seemed caricatures of themselves
| (like season 5 of a comedy series where the writing
| devolves into self-referential insider jokes about the past
| seasons).
|
| I feel terrible saying that.
|
| Will Adventure games come back, or are we lost on the new
| ADHD world of interruptible short content?
| mancerayder wrote:
| Is that true? While there's a much larger overall volume of
| content out there, many many games to choose from... Don't
| you see a pattern around first person shooters, real life
| 'simulators' built on repetitive OCD grind, and a general
| sense of sameness?
|
| Nothing feels really novel. Where the innovation is seems to
| focus on graphical realism, which of course I love.
|
| I'm strongly attached to Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 and while
| I'm near the end of the game, I'm dragging my feet so I don't
| have to go back to the drawing board of sorting through
| endless terrible FPS and retro hack and slash games on Steam
| that don't interest me and are copies of 20 year old games.
|
| Adventure games (the topic here) are my favorite though, and
| it's very rare that anything comes out. The Sierra and
| LucasArts days are over (RIP). That said a few gems come out
| here and there, like Lucy Dreaming.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| > All games involve some kind of exploration, but I'm talking
| about something like _Myst_ , the long-ago graphic adventures
| by LucasArts and Interplay, where the whole central mechanic of
| the game was basically "click on everything everywhere." Today,
| those games can feel hilariously primitive, and they were
| probably always pretty boring for the vast majority of people
| who didn't start playing videogames until they got an iPhone.
| But there's a serenity to _Myst_ that you can't really find in
| any major videogame today. It's videogame Tarkovsky, really:
| The whole point of the game is experiencing the quiet, looking
| at everything. So _Myst_ is boring, but only in the way
| Tarkovsky and Russian novels are boring. (The problem isn't
| that they're slow. The problem is that the world has made you
| too fast.)
|
| - Darren Franich, "Metal Gear Solid: The strangest great
| videogame franchise"
|
| https://ew.com/article/2015/09/04/metal-gear-solid-strangest...
| k__ wrote:
| Terraria and Stardew Valley show that it isn't just about
| graphics.
| maccard wrote:
| If this is your view of modern gaming, I think it's you that
| has changed. This year alone my play list has been - blue
| prince, hollow knight: silksong, Ball X pit, split fiction,
| clair obscur, monster hunter wilds, arc raiders, helldivers 2
| (came to Xbox, so this one is a stretch), nightrein, Indiana
| jones, dispatch... That's on top of the "big" hitter that are
| still very fun experiences.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| > Play was central to the formation of personal computer culture.
|
| In his book, Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World, Steven
| Johnson applies this thesis to pretty much all the things.
| Enjoyable book, but the thesis probably does not hold up too much
| scrutiny.
| anthk wrote:
| For Spanish speakers there, there's "Aventura.z5" at IFDB, you
| can play it with a Frotz interpreter. It's 99% close to the
| original modulo some odd wordplay. The backstory and all it's the
| same, with the Mammoth Cave descriptions with the slaves and the
| like.
| christkv wrote:
| I think the most annoying thing of a lot of modern games is the
| whole crafting thing that is bolted onto everything. But there
| are some real gems out there for old school gamers. I loved
| Baldurs Gate 3, Divinity 2, Expedition 33 and Disco Elysium for
| example as really fun and interesting CRPG's. It's just that the
| cost of taking a risk these days is to high for studios and most
| kids are playing "free" games for most of their time. So even
| though the market is big it feels like the "growth" is mostly in
| the "free" games part of the market which is terrible.
| turkishmonky wrote:
| I fondly remember playing games typed out from books and
| magazines when I was younger - although I usually tricked my
| little brother into typing out the game so we could both play it.
|
| Jokes on me though, since now he can type at over 100 wpm (and
| uses dvorak)
| sizzzzlerz wrote:
| I'd just begun my first professional engineering job after
| college. The company I was working for had a mainframe computer
| on which there was a copy of Adventure. When I discovered the
| game, there were a number of late nights playing it. One night,
| long after everyone had gone home, I was playing in my office
| with the lights off. The only light was from the green
| phosphorous monitor I was using. All of a sudden, I stumbled into
| the breath-taking view room with its erupting volcano. The words
| describing the scene filled the screen with descriptive prose
| that simply glowed in the dark room. The effect was mesmerizing.
| Forty-seven years later, I've never forgotten that.
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