What Text Adventures Taught Me About Software

I was maybe ten years old, sitting in front of a Commodore 64, staring at a screen that showed nothing but words. "You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here." That single paragraph contained an entire world.

Text adventures (Colossal Cave Adventure, Zork, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Planetfall) shaped how I think about software, storytelling, and the relationship between creator and user. After 45 years of building software, I can trace half my instincts about interface design back to those games. They taught me that constraints aren't limitations. They're invitations to imagine harder.

Worlds Built From Words

It started with Colossal Cave Adventure in 1976, the original text adventure, created by Will Crowther, a caver and programmer at BBN. The game was inspired by Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, and its two-word parser ("GO NORTH", "GET LAMP") established the grammar that would define the genre. Zork came next, expanding the vocabulary and the ambition. You can still play Adventure, Zork I, and Zork II in your browser today. They hold up remarkably well.

The technical specs were laughable by modern standards. A Commodore 64 had 64 kilobytes of RAM. Not megabytes. Not gigabytes. Kilobytes. The entire operating system, the game engine, and the sprawling underground empire of Zork all had to fit in a space smaller than a single low-resolution image today.

And yet those games felt vast. The Great Underground Empire had hundreds of locations. Hitchhiker's Guide spanned galaxies. And somewhere in the dark tunnels lurked the Grue, a monster never shown but terrifying nonetheless. "It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue." Eight words more effective than any AAA horror game's rendering budget. How? Because the most powerful graphics processor ever created isn't a GPU. It's the human imagination.

When I first encountered these games, I didn't see the limitations. I saw a world where anything described could be real. A paragraph about a dark forest became genuinely menacing. A description of an alien spacecraft became awe-inspiring. The gap between what the computer showed me and what I experienced was filled by my own mind. That made the experience more personal, more memorable, than any photorealistic rendering.

Object Orientation Before the Term

Long before I was wrestling with Python classes or Rust structs, text adventures taught me the essence of state and hierarchy. I didn't know the vocabulary yet, but I was learning the concepts.

In Zork, a "Room" wasn't just a description. It was a container object. It had properties (light/dark, visited/unvisited), behaviors (on_enter events), and a collection of children (items you could interact with). When you typed "TAKE SWORD," you weren't just changing a string. You were performing a tree reorganization, moving an object from the Room's child collection to the Player's inventory collection.

Consider what that teaches you:

• State is everything. The game world was a graph of connected states. Each command transformed one state into another.
• Objects have identity. The brass lantern in the Trophy Case was the same brass lantern you found in the maze. Moving it didn't create a copy.
• Containment matters. Items could be inside other items. The leaflet was in the mailbox. The mailbox was in the field. Hierarchies all the way down.

This is object-oriented thinking, absorbed through play before anyone taught me the formal concepts. Software isn't about code. It's about the movement of state through a defined graph. Zork taught me that at age ten.

The Collaboration Nobody Talks About

I've seen how modern games work. They're passive experiences dressed up as interactive ones. You watch cutscenes. You follow waypoints. You're guided through carefully scripted sequences designed to look like choices while offering none.

Text adventures were genuinely collaborative. The author provided the skeleton (locations, objects, possible actions), but you built the flesh. What did the white house look like? What did the troll's voice sound like? That was yours to decide.

As one game design essay puts it: the main character isn't yours anymore; the player owns it from the moment they start playing. The author becomes the strings, the control pad, the person who made the marionette, not the one controlling it. This philosophy feels radical in an era where games increasingly tell you exactly what to think and feel.

Constraints as Creative Fuel

Infocom, the company behind Zork and dozens of other text adventures, faced an impossible challenge. How do you ship games for Apple II, Commodore 64, IBM PC, and a dozen other incompatible platforms?

Their solution was the Z-machine, a virtual machine that could run the same "story file" on any hardware with an interpreter. As MIT Technology Review noted, this was "write once, run anywhere" decades before Java made the concept mainstream. Constraints forced them to invent something elegant, portable, and ahead of its time.

The same pressure shaped the writing. Every byte mattered. There was no room for bloat. Descriptions had to be evocative but economical. Puzzles had to emerge from the world's internal logic, not from arbitrary obstacles. The result was prose that was tighter, funnier, and more memorable than most modern game writing.

Douglas Adams, working with Infocom's Steve Meretzky on the Hitchhiker's Guide adaptation, discovered something interesting. The constraints of the medium forced him to think differently about comedy. In a novel, you control pacing. In a game, the player does. Every joke had to work regardless of when the player encountered it.

And that towel? "A towel is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have." In the text adventure, you actually needed it. According to Britannica's gaming history, the famous Babel Fish puzzle became so notoriously difficult that Infocom sold "I got the Babel Fish" t-shirts. A badge of honor from creative pressure.

What the Parser Taught Me About Interfaces

Text adventures communicated through a parser, a system that interpreted natural language commands. "OPEN MAILBOX." "GO NORTH." "PICK UP SWORD." And here's the thing that captivated me: the parser seemed to understand me.

It didn't, of course. Not really. The technology was remarkably crude: pattern matching, keyword recognition, a vocabulary of maybe a few hundred words. But Infocom's designers were masters of illusion. They anticipated what players would try and handled it gracefully.

Type "KILL TROLL WITH SWORD" and it worked. But so did "ATTACK TROLL" and "HIT TROLL" and "FIGHT TROLL" and sometimes even "MURDER TROLL VIOLENTLY."

When you typed something the game couldn't parse, you got responses like "I don't understand that" or "You can't see any such thing here." These felt like genuine confusion rather than error messages. The game felt intelligent because it failed intelligently.

I remember spending hours testing the boundaries. What could I say? What would it understand? I was reverse-engineering the illusion, trying to find where the intelligence ended and the keyword matching began. That was its own kind of game: figuring out how the magic trick worked.

Context, Not Comprehension

The parser wasn't actually understanding language. It was doing something more clever: it was understanding context. In a room with a lamp, "GET LAMP" resolved unambiguously. In a room with both a brass lamp and a lantern, it would ask "Which do you mean?" Simple system, sophisticated experience. The designers had thought carefully about every edge case.

This taught me something about interface design that's still relevant: users don't care about your implementation. They care about whether the system responds to their intent. The parser wasn't really about parsing. It was about creating the impression of understanding, and doing it consistently enough that you suspended disbelief.

Modern chatbots and AI assistants are direct descendants of this approach. The goal isn't to process language; it's to understand intent. Ben Brown, who built AI-powered chatbots, credits Zork with teaching him how narrative and interaction intersect. "Zork is a narrative," he wrote, "but embedded within it are clues about how the user can interact with and affect the story."

The parser was the first conversational interface. In some ways, it was more honest than its successors. It had clear limits. You learned them. You worked within them. Today's AI chatbots hallucinate confidence while failing unpredictably.

When you type git status, you are playing a text adventure. "You are in a detached HEAD state. There are uncommitted changes here." The interface is the same: a command line, a parser, a world model that responds to your actions. Every time you git checkout, you're saying "GO NORTH." Every git merge is "GET LAMP." The mental model is identical: you're navigating a graph of states, manipulating objects, trying not to get eaten by a grue (or worse, a merge conflict).

The GPU of the Mind

There's a concept in comics and media theory called "closure." When an artist draws two panels (a man swinging an axe, then the man walking away), the hit happens in the gutter between the frames. The reader's mind creates the impact. The artist doesn't have to draw the violence; the reader imagines it, and that makes it more powerful.

Text adventures are all gutter. The entire experience lives in that space between what's described and what's imagined.

By not rendering the dragon in 4K, the game forces you to become a co-creator. You're not consuming content. You're generating it, frame by frame, in your head. This isn't a limitation. It's a feature of engagement. Your dragon is scarier than any pre-rendered dragon because it's your dragon, assembled from every dragon you've ever encountered in books, movies, nightmares.

In modern UX, we often over-design. We fill every pixel, animate every transition, anticipate every need. But there's a cost: we leave no room for the user's brain to engage. The most "immersive" software is often the one that knows when to get out of the way. The one that trusts users to complete the picture themselves.

The best documentation I've written works this way. The best APIs too. You provide enough structure to orient, then trust competent users to fill in the gaps. Hand-holding isn't service. Sometimes it's condescension.

The Problem with Better Graphics

When point-and-click adventures arrived in the late 1980s, they were hailed as an evolution. No more typing. Pictures. Animation. The genre seemed to advance.

But something was lost. The moment you show me what a room looks like, you've limited what it can be. When Zork told me I was in a "dimly lit forest," my forest was unique. It was informed by every forest I'd ever seen, every story I'd ever read, every nightmare I'd ever had. Your forest was different. Both were valid. Both were real.

Graphics collapse that possibility space into a single canonical interpretation. The production values went up. The imagination went down.

I'm not arguing we should go back to text-only interfaces. But I am saying that more isn't always better. Sometimes the gap between what's provided and what's experienced is where the magic lives. The early online communities understood this too.

Lessons That Transferred

The skills I developed playing text adventures transferred directly to building software:

• Systematic exploration. Good text adventures rewarded methodical players who mapped the territory, took notes, and thought carefully about what they'd learned. That's debugging.
• Reading carefully. The difference between solving a puzzle and being stuck forever was often a single word in a room description. Details matter.
• Thinking in states. Each command transformed the game world from one state to another. Understanding those transformations (and their reversibility) is fundamental to programming.
• Communicating with precision. The parser was unforgiving. "GET LAMP" worked; "GRAB THE LAMP" might not. Learning to express intent clearly and unambiguously is a skill that serves you everywhere.

These weren't games that taught programming through tutorials. They taught the mindset of programming through play.

The Return of the Parser

We're exiting the "Era of the Button" and re-entering the "Era of the Parser."

For thirty years, we forced users to navigate rigid menus because our machines couldn't understand intent. GUIs were a workaround for limited natural language processing. Point and click. Tap the icon. Select from the dropdown. These aren't natural ways to communicate. They're accommodations for machines that couldn't do better.

Now, with LLMs, the natural language interface is back. ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot: they're all parsers. You type what you want. They try to understand. Sound familiar?

But here's what haunts me: the same frustrations that killed text adventures are the primary hurdles for AI today. The "guess the verb" problem (when players couldn't figure out what magic words the parser wanted) drove people away from text adventures. "I know what I want to do, but I can't figure out how to say it."

Today's AI has the same problem, inverted. Users can say anything, but the AI often can't figure out what they mean. Or it thinks it knows and hallucinates confidence. The parser's greatest strength was predictable failure. Modern AI fails unpredictably.

To build the next generation of AI software, we shouldn't only study modern mobile apps. We should study how Infocom handled "failing gracefully." When the parser didn't understand, it didn't pretend it did. It asked clarifying questions. It suggested alternatives. It had the wit and corrective guidance of a 1980s dungeon master.

If your AI doesn't have that, if it barrels forward pretending to understand when it doesn't, it will fail for the exact same reasons text adventures died: user frustration, broken trust, the feeling that you're fighting the interface instead of using it.

Why This Still Matters

We're drowning in high-fidelity experiences that leave nothing to the imagination. Games that show everything. Social media that documents everything. AI that generates everything.

The cost is a kind of atrophy. When you never have to imagine what something looks like, you forget how. When every possible variation is rendered in 4K, there's nothing left to wonder about.

Text adventures were exercises in active imagination. They required you to be a co-creator, not a consumer. They proved that the least technically impressive approach could create the most emotionally resonant experiences.

Here's what haunts me: Infocom did it in 48 kilobytes. They didn't use neural nets; they used state machines. They didn't have billions of parameters; they had careful design. And their systems failed gracefully, predictably, within known boundaries. Today we burn megawatts training models that hallucinate, that lose context, that forget what room they're in. Maybe the lesson isn't that we need more compute. Maybe it's that we forgot how to be clever with less.

Sid Meier, creator of Civilization, made this point at GDC: the player's imagination is more powerful than any library of expensive audiovisual assets. It's cheaper, more flexible, and creates deeper engagement. Text adventures knew this decades before the industry forgot it.

"The best technology doesn't replace human imagination. It activates it."