
Notable early mainframe games include The Sumerian Game, Lunar Lander, The Oregon Trail, and Star Trek. At that time, video terminals were expensive and being experimented as " glass teletypes", and the user would submit commands via the teleprinter interlaced with the mainframe, the output being printed on paper. Text-based games trace as far back as teleprinters in the 1960s, when they were installed on early mainframe computers as an input-and-output form. : 19 Text data also has the advantage of requiring small processing power and minimal graphical capabilities by modern standards, as well as significantly reducing production costs compared to graphical data. For example, ASCII uses 96 printable characters in its set of 128, : 27 whereas ANSI uses both ASCII and 128 additional characters from extended ASCII and allows the text to be variously colored, allowing for further possibilities. : 52 That said, a text-based game is any electronic game whereby information is conveyed as encoded text in the user interface.Īlthough technically graphical when displayed on a computer monitor, text data is sometimes contrasted with graphics as the former is text-only data representation conveyed via an output device is restricted to a given set of encodable characters and the total number thereof, as well as graphical capabilities. Only read binary code, encoding formats are typically written in such, where a bit is the smallest unit of data that has two possible values and each combination of bits represents a byte.

Strictly speaking, text-based means employing an encoding system of characters designed to be printable as text data.

They have been the basis of instigating genres of video gaming, especially adventure and role-playing video games. With that, notable titles were developed for those computers using the sprinter in the 1960s and 1970s and more numerous game titles have been developed for our video terminals since at least the mid-1970s, having reached their peak popularity in that decade and the 1980s, and continued as early online games into the mid-1990s.Īlthough generally replaced in favor of video games that utilize non-textual graphics, text-based games continue to be written by independent developers. Such as ASCII, instead of bitmap or vector graphics.Īll text-based games have been well documented since at least the 1960s, when teleprinters were interlaced with mainframe computers as a form of input, where the output was printed on paper.

A text game or text-based game is an electronic game that uses a text-based user interface, that is, the user interface employs a set of encodable characters,
