Text-based game

A text game or text-based game is a video game that uses text characters instead of bitmap or vector graphics. Text-based games were a popular form of interactive fiction in the 1980s.

Overview

Text games are typically easier to write and require less processing power than games with graphics, and thus were more common from 1970 to 1990. However, terminal emulators are still in use today, and people continue playing MUDs (multi-user dungeon) and exploring interactive fiction. Many beginning programmers still create these types of games to familiarize themselves with a programming language, and contests even now are held on who can finish programming a roguelike within a short time period, such as seven days.

While many of the earliest computer games (Adventure, Zork) relied on language parsing due to the command line-driven, teletype-terminal mainframe environments in which they were developed, the phrase "text-based" is taken to refer not to the user input (though generally keyboard-based) but rather to exclusive use of the fixed-width character display mode, an important distinction to maintain in light of curses based games such as Rogue and their successors, which employed the characters in the text mode as map symbols rather than as parts of words. Despite enormous differences in display and user interface, the text adventure games and roguelikes both make exclusive use of the text mode, and hence are both to be considered text-based.