This post is from one of several previous incarnations of this site and probably doesn’t quite fit the current format. In a former life this was a group blog and a tumblelog before it became a static jekyll site. If anything looks broken or is worded oddly that could be why. Pardon the dust.
In today’s games a lot of our imagining is done for us, so there’s still something very intriguing about the long-retired genre of text-adventuring. The king of the interactive fiction hill was undoubtedly Infocom, with Zork as their crowning glory. Adventure Collective has interviews with original staffers Dave Lebling and Steve Meretzky. You can play many of the classics online through the wonder of java, or if you prefer the MUD feel, try telnet (if it’s not too busy that is).