The first adventure game I ever played was...Adventure. It was line oriented, no graphics. You would start it up and after asking if you wanted instructions it would say, "You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully." Then you would type N, E, S or W to indicate the direction you wanted to go next.
It was written at MIT around 1975 by Will Crowther. It was line oriented and written in Fortran. I had a copy of the source at one point that someone in my group at DEC was using to port to RSX-11. Once mastered, a couple friends had races to see who could complete the adventure in the fewest steps. It was always easy to tell who won. You would just stretch out the teletype paper side-by-side and see which was shortest.
It's famous, there's lots of information about it on the Internet.
I've only played four graphical computer games, and they're all adventure style games:
- Curse of Monkey Island
- Escape from Monkey Island
- Grim Fandango
- The Longest Journey
May you never wind up in a mazy of twisty little passages, all alike!
--Percy
™ Version 4.2