Old Skool Text Adventure games

 Proper retro-throwback this one.  Some of us may remember the glorious (no they weren't) days of text adventure games. Yes, the days of just having textual descriptions written out before you and a limited set of instructions you could perform, such as >go north and >pick up axe or even >use axe on elf

If you had graphics, they were very limited and crude.  I do recall a game from around 1985-ish called:

The Heroes of Khan

I got stuck for soooooo long before someone else told me, >use tinder on gas (such a potential different meaning today) and I then managed to get a bit further, but then gave up and moved onto other things, like playing Manic Miner.

Anyway, what I was meant to be doing was referencing this "new" website that allows you to build and run text adventures all within your web browser - you can now play them anywhere you have a fixed keyboard (as you have to be able to type).

It's called https://adventuron.io/

 

Looks like a nifty, albeit niche idea.

Somewhere in the loft/attic, I do have a 100 room/location text adventure all written out in pen on A4 paper from the early 80s, that I was one day going to make into an adventure.  Next time I'm up there, I just might have an extra look to see if I can find it and who knows, I just might type it in....

You might be wondering, "huh? this is a bit random?".

Think about it.... it's a great way for kids (9-13-ish) to get into understanding language...NLP, Natural Language Processing.... "oooooh!".  If they can start to understand how the sentences are tokenised, each word understood then in a few more years the NLTK toolkit becomes a natural progression and we end up with more people making a lot smarter things.

Sometimes, you do have to look back in order to go forward.  Especially in todays fast paced technically accelerated society.  Besides, getting youngsters to be creators (as well as users) isn't a bad thing, is it?