The Incomparable Podcast, number 75, January 2012.

Welcome back to The Incomparable Podcast. My name is Greg Noss, your host. Jason Snell is a way on assignment.

Today we're going to be discussing text adventures.

These are computer games that were at their most popular in the early to mid-80s.

You'd run the game, and it would give you a description of the room that you were standing in,

a textual description, just words on the screen,

and would describe exits and objects in the room,

and then you would use English sentences, often very, very simple English sentences,

like get lamp and inventory and go north, to interact with the environment.

The goal of the games was usually to collect objects and solve puzzles with them.

You would be presented with situations that required you to think through how what you had in your inventory and what in the room could be used together.

There was often scoring systems that would give you particular points for how you accomplished each of these solutions.

But more often, the goal was just to finish the game,

to get to the end to find out how the story concluded.

With me today are Monty Ashley.

Hello.

Hello, Monty.

And Steve Lutz.

Hello, Sailor.

Nothing happens here.

Tech's adventures have a long and distinguished history.

They started in 1975 when Will Crowther built the game adventure.

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