List of text based games

the earliest computer games (Adventure, Zork) relied on language parsing due to the command line-driven, teletype-terminal mainframe environments in which they were developed, the phrase "text based" is taken to refer not to the user input (though generally keyboard-based) but rather to exclusive use of the fixed-width character display mode, an important distinction to maintain in light of curses games such as Rogue and their successors, which employed the characters in the text mode as map symbols rather than as parts of words.