Why Text Based Games Are Still Better

The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy movie will premiere within days. I'm seeing a flurry of coverage of the text-based computer game, based on the same book, that came out in 1982; the BBC now hosts not one but two illustrated remakes and an interview with Steve Meretzky about what it was like to “implement” (as it was called back then) the original game for Infocom. I love the part where Steve Meretzky lists some of Douglas Adams's contributions:

like having an inventory object called “no tea” having the game lie to you; having to argue with the game to get past a certain door; having an object called "the thing your aunt gave you which you don't know what it is" which keeps coming back to you even if you get rid of it; having a player input... which couldn't be understood by the game... be the words which fall through a wormhole in the universe and start an interstellar war.

Yes, all of these ideas made it into the game. Try doing them with graphics and a point-and-click Sierra interface. I remember when Activision released The Lost Treasures of Infocom collections in the early 90's, amid a flurry of hype, many were reminded that text-based adventure games were better than graphical ones. Now graphic adventure games are dead too, and such sophistication will have to be found elsewhere.