A Modern Architectural Review of Text-Based Adventure Games

Let's talk about classic text-adventure games from a modern standpoint? How would you develop a game like Zork with "modern" tools?

You will likely be eaten by a grue.

Before the days of World of Warcraft, Fortnight, and Minecraft, computer-based entertainment relied solely on the constructs of text.

Text-based adventure games such as Adventure, Zork, and The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy defined a genre that allowed players to explore immersive interactive environments. Many of the great games on the market today owe their existence to these marvels of computer engineering.

Adventure games, underneath their ASCII facades, were faced with several unique computer science-style problems. Text parsing, managing room states, inventories, events, and more.

In this session, you will be taken on a trip in the wayback machine to discuss these classic games. You'll see modern approaches to solving some of these complex problems that definitely would not have scaled on early computers.

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