A text game or text-based game is a video game that uses text characters instead of bitmapped or vector graphics. Text games are typically easier to write and require less processing power than graphical games, and thus were more common from 1970 to 1990. However, terminal emulators are still in use today, and people continue playing MUDs and exploring interactive fiction. Many beginning programmers still create these types of games to familiariz...
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A text game or text-based game is a video game that uses text characters instead of bitmapped or vector graphics. Text games are typically easier to write and require less processing power than graphical games, and thus were more common from 1970 to 1990. However, terminal emulators are still in use today, and people continue playing MUDs and exploring interactive fiction. Many beginning programmers still create these types of games to familiarize themselves with a programming language.
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...
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