The magic of graphic adventures began… without graphics, to be precise. All you could see was a screen full of text, and the rest was a matter of dodging the syntax traps the programmer had left along the way. Now, would you like to be on the other side? If you want to create your own text adventures, the answer is yes, and all you need is Quest, a dedicated engine you can master in no time, which even has an online version.
Several sources indicate that Colossal Cave Adventure was the first text adventure written in English, originally available for the PDP-10 system. However, the Zork saga is responsible for the genre's commercial explosion, selling nearly 700,000 copies across its three main games. The transition from text to graphics took several years, but inevitably visual richness and color came to dominate the market.
Today, text adventures are a simple curiosity, memories of a time when every player had to squeeze their brain to find solutions that more than once bordered on the absurd. That said… would you like to write one?
Quest: A Free Engine for Interactive Fiction
Let's make room for Quest, a creation engine focused on interactive fiction that anyone can use for free. The good news is that Quest does not require programming knowledge. Its introductory tutorial takes a little over seven minutes, and at first the interface seems intimidating, but that plays in favor of its enormous flexibility.
If you wish, you can make a pure text adventure, or insert different multimedia elements such as graphics, sound files, or videos available on YouTube and Vimeo. Although the main interface is in English, Quest supports creating games in several languages, including Spanish.
Quest has an open source edition compatible with Windows, and as an alternative (in case downloading files is not possible or you use another operating system) there is an online version that works very well. Its only requirement is that we must create an account beforehand, or use other compatible credentials (Facebook, Google, Microsoft). Finally, its official site also serves as hosting for other adventures created by users.
