vivdunstan

I'm reading Aaron A. Reed's 50 Years of Text Games book. This was based on a series of blogs, each looking at an important game for each of 50 years. But the published book expands on that content considerably. I have a hardback copy and an ebook.

I'm currently early on in the book, in the 1970s, and was just amused by some of the snippets of info from a general chapter about computer text games in that period, not just the main ones featured in the book. Here are some snapshots:

• 1973 Lemonade Stand - 50 years old this year! This was one of the first computer games I played, in 1980 on an Apple II dad borrowed to bring home over the Christmas period.
• 1977 Atom20 - a post apocalyptic (!) clone of The Oregon Trail. That must have been fun to play ...
• 1977 Trek80 - a Star Trek game "with the twist that you could place an AM radio near your computer to get sound effects". Cor.
• 1978 Empyrean Challenge - a play by mail game with 150 players and "turn results could be hundreds of pages long". I played a lot of play by mail games in the 1980s and 1990s, and even getting a turn through the letterbox that was 5 pages long could be exciting. But hundreds?! Wow.

Aaron's book is very good, somewhat US-centric in places, but still has good coverage of places and types of text games. It is currently not in print, but there is an ebook version currently available, and there will be a print on demand coming soon. And the original blogs about 50 key text games are still freely online to read.