Left: a normal animal. Right: a platypus.
Left: a normal video game. Right: a text adventure.
It isn't just the visual format that makes this genre totally unconnected to any other. Text adventures set themselves apart because of the unique challenges that language-based communication provides, the fact that the Internet didn't exist at the time, and their extremely sharp learning curve.
A Brief History
Text adventures are games where you explore and solve puzzles using only words. For instance, Zork finds you roaming an underground kingdom collecting treasure. Roaming underground and collecting treasure was an extremely popular theme in the dinosaur days of gaming (Zork, Advent, Adventureland, etc.). This is probably because, if you're exploring a dark cave, you don't feel like you're missing much in the way of graphics. Text adventures were immediate hits because of their stellar writing and cross-compatibility. You know how you can't play Xbox games on a PlayStation, or PlayStation games on a PC? Well, in 1980, every computer was like that. Making a graphics-based game that was playable on every computer was tough, but text adventures just used words -- so they were easily ported to any machine.
The creator of the first commercial text adventure game was Scott Adams, who published Adventureland in 1978. This led to a slew of popular games by Adams. In the early 1980s, game company Infocom took center stage with the Zork series and a host of hit titles. What was cool about Infocom games is you could interact with them more fully. Instead of just "throw gnome" (most games at the time had a two-word parser), Infocom games could understand "throw the little green gnome at the rack of beer bottles."
Although these games were successful, their limitations eventually doomed them. As technology improved and PCs started to run the same software, text adventures gradually disappeared from store shelves. Which is OK, because text adventures had some severe limitations that some gamers could never overcome. Limitations which made them the freak shows of gaming. Limitations like these.
Words I Don't Understand
Have you ever been playing a video game, and mistook a bolt of lightning for a dinner fork? No? Never? That's because we are lucky enough to play games which actually have pictures. However, this wasn't so for text adventures. The verbose writing styles, combined with my limited vocabulary (I was like six years old), meant I often got stuck simply not knowing what was going on. Here's a riddle from the Infocom game Beyond Zork:
My tines are long
My tines are short
My tines end 'ere
My first report.
First of all, who the hell thought it would be a good idea to use the word "'ere" instead of the word "before?" I don't care if it fits the meter, I literally spent weeks trying to figure out what "'ere" meant. Keep in mind this is a riddle, so I can't type "examine 'ere," or "talk to 'ere," or "stick 'ere where the sun don't shine." Finally, I figured out what "'ere" meant, so I could tackle the meat of this comprehension problem: figuring out what a "tines" is. Luckily, I had a dictionary, which informed me that tines are "sharp, pointed ends, such as on a dinner fork." Great, I finally had all the information I needed to tackle this utensil-related riddle.
The answer is "lightning," by the way, which had nothing to do with dinner forks. If I recall correctly, Beyond Zork took me 12 years to beat.
Do you know what an organ grinder's music box is called? I do, because I had to figure it out in order to solve Beyond Zork. It's called a "hurdy gurdy," and it's one of the millions of useless definitions cluttering my mind. I bet when the '80s generation of text-adventurers began schooling, they had the reading comprehension skills of Proust (and the social skills of a drunken comedy writer).