Yes, to a certain segment of the population I suppose I define myself as a relic of ancient times when I insist that one can write good and absorbing computer games that don’t have a GUI – that throw down old-school in a terminal emulator.
Today I’m shipping a new release of the game greed – which is, I think, one of the better arguments for this proposition. Others include roguelike dungeon crawlers (nethack, angband, moria, larn), VMS Empire, the whole universe of text adventure games that began with ADVENT and Zork, and Super Star Trek.
I maintain a bunch of these old games, including an improved version of the BSD Battleships game and even a faithful port of the oldest of them all: wumpus, which I let you play (if you want) in a mode that emulates the awful original BASIC interface, all-caps as far as the eye can see.
Some of these I keep alive only because somebody ought to; they’re the heritage grain of computer gaming, even if they look unimpressive to the modern eye. But others couldn’t really be much improved by a GUI; greed, in particular, is like that. In fact, if you ranked heritage terminal games by how little GUIfication would improve then, I think greed would probably be right at the top (perhaps sharing that honor with ski). That in itself makes greed a bit interesting.
Much has been gained by GUIfying games; I have my own favorites in that style, notably Civilization II and Spaceward Ho! and Battle For Wesnoth (on which I was a developer for years). But the very best terminal games retain, I think, a distinct charm of their own.
Some of them (text adventures, roguelikes) work, I think, the way a novel does, or Scott McCloud taught us minimalist cartooning does; they engage the user’s own imagination as a peripheral, setting up a surprisingly strong interaction between the user’s private imagery and the bare elements of the game. At their best, such games (like novels) can have a subtle imaginative richness that goes well beyond anything this week’s graphical splatterfest offers.
More abstract puzzle games like greed don’t quite do that. What they offer instead is some of the same appeal as tiling window managers. In these games there is no waste, no excess, no bloat, no distraction; it’s all puzzle value all the way down. There’s a bracing quality about that.
Ski is kind of hermaphroditic that way. You can approach it as a cartoon (Aieee! Here comes the Yeti! Flee for your life!) or as a pure puzzle game. It works either way.
Finally, maybe it’s just me, but one thing I think these old-school terminal games consistently do better than their modern competition is humor. This is probably the McCloud effect again. I’ve laughed harder at, and retained longer, the wry turns of phrase from classic text adventures than any sight gag I’ve ever seen in a GUI game.
So, enjoy. It’s an odd and perhaps half-forgotten corner of our culture, but no less valuable for that.
UPDATE: I probably shouldn’t have described wumpus (1972) as “the oldest of them all”, because there were a few older games for teletypes like Hammurabi, aka Hamurabi (with a single ‘m’) aka The Sumer game from 1968. But wumpus is the oldest one that seems to be live in the memory of the hacker culture; only SPACEWAR (1961) has a longer pedigree, and it’s a different (vector graphics) kind of thing.