Dwarf Fortress, Nethack (and all the other roguelikes) and Megazeux are some of the more popular ones.

If you've never played ANSI Dude, I recommend checking it out. Snipes is another neat text-mode game, notable for its early support for networked multiplayer. You also can't go wrong with QBasic Nibbles or Gorillas.

Im a huge roguelike and interactive fiction fan..

there is also some cool stuff called ZZT, its text mode and CRAZY! ZZT is awesome.

So far, the best one is the compilation.

There is Arcanoid, Pacman, Frogger and Space Invaders clones in it. I wonder if these games were released separately.

Pakupaku's a decent faithful textmode pacman clone designed for the 4.77mhz's, though it's very Moraff-ish in about its license IIRC

Kroz

Loved ZZT on my Dad's crappy old CGA laptop. Fascinating interview with Tim Sweeney here charting his journey from ZZT to Unreal Engine and building Epic Games.
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/132426/ … future_tim_.php

Always liked KROZ. ASCII games fascinated me. I once wrote my own 40x25 ASCII game in Turbo C++/Borland C++ called Faceman. It's a simple game where you have 100 moves to collect 20 gems placed randomly on the screen. One step in any 4 directions counts as one move (I didn't support diagonals...don't know why I didn't bother adding that). The trick is you can also move to the extreme borders of the playing area in one move with HOME, END, PGUP, PGDN, and C (for center). Neat little unique somewhat-skillful somewhat-not gameplay mechanic. Nothing special and not always possible to win, but I was proud to have finished it. My first official game. Still have it. Since there's no buffering in text mode, however, the screen constantly flickers when you make a move because it's constantly redrawing the entire screen after every keypress.

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

You also can't go wrong with QBasic Nibbles or Gorillas.

Sorry to nitpick, but Gorillas isn't text mode.

EDIT: Looked it up, it uses mode 9 (640x350x16)

Some of my favourites from back in the day: Beast, The Game With No Name, Orby, Cash Crisis (space invaders clone) and Plebs. Then there were the text adventures like Jacaranda Jim and Humbug. Willy the Worm gets an honourable mention (it's really 320x200, but uses it like text mode with a slightly redefined character set).

I even made one myself as a teenager: http://www.reenigne.org/computer/software/cooldude.zip . If you use VGA it redefines the character set. The sampled sound doesn't seem to work properly on DOSBox 0.74 for some reason - not sure if this is a DOSBox bug or if I broke the code at some point.

reenigne wrote:

Then there were the text adventures like Jacaranda Jim and Humbug.

Graham Cluley wrote both of those, its a shame he didnt write more interactive fiction. They were good games.

Have to second Beast. Also, Pyro II -- and there's a newer game called Multiplex that actually combines those previous two very well. Still text-mode/DOS, but needs a fairly fast system IIRC.

Might add:
- Snipes
- AnsiDude
- Pitman
- Duck Hunt (there are *two* text-mode DOS clones of the NES original - at least one of them is decent)

For mild amusement (if not much else):
- Avoid the Awful Thing that Vaguely Resembles a Banana!! (actual title)
- Desert Race (a 'racing' game implemented completely as a batch file)

oerk wrote:

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

You also can't go wrong with QBasic Nibbles or Gorillas.

Sorry to nitpick, but Gorillas isn't text mode.

EDIT: Looked it up, it uses mode 9 (640x350x16)

It's more of a curiosity/nostalgia thing anyway. I always could've sworn it used a tweaked text mode, but you're probably right.

Great titles. For me personally, Tetris included with Dos Navigator is a state of the art. Fast, simple and esthetic. Anybody knows any good tetris or arcanoid with these standards?

I've made a text mode pong, does it coint?

Send it to me 😀 I want to play it.
I played Text mode pong in the past - it was very cool and advanced.

DOS Navigator has nice textmode Tetris. 😀
The earliest (1986) known PC versions of this game were in text mode.