Text Adventures predate most other computer games, dating back to mainframes in the 70's.
The Original Adventure game, Colossal Cave, was written in FORTRAN on a Digital PDP-10 Mainframe in 1972 by Willie Crowther. Willie was a programmer who was writing the original Assembler Code for the first routers used by ARPANET, the precursor of the Internet.
Significant improvements to the game were made by Don Woods. Woods was working at Stanford's Artificial Intelligence Lab in 1976. He added Tolkien-like Trolls, and a Dragon!
People used to play the game on their mainframes at work! This was prior to the development of the personal computer and the browseable internet
The Digital Equipment Corporation, now a part of Compaq and HP, used to distribute Adventure through DECUS, its user group! The Original IBM PC
came with the game Adventure!
MUD is an online, multi-user dungeon like game.
Infocom released many Text Adventures in the 80's
invented Adventure
improved Adventure
Play Simula as is, or use it to create your own game! There is a Heaven, and a hell, in my game.
Now uses Wordpad Files!
a tiny HTML version of Simula to play online.