Interactive fiction began with text adventures in the mid-1970s, when a programmer and caver named Will Crowther wrote Adventure, later known as Colossal Cave Adventure. The idea reached print with Choose Your Own Adventure books from 1979, became a commercial genre through Infocom’s Zork, faded as graphics took over, survived as a hobbyist form with tools like Inform (1993) and Twine (2009), and moved to phones in the 2010s as choice apps and chat stories.
What is interactive fiction? #
In the narrow sense, interactive fiction means text adventures: games where you type commands like GO NORTH or OPEN DOOR and the game describes what happens. In the broader sense most readers use today, it’s any story where your input changes what happens next. That covers gamebooks, choice-based games, visual novels and chat stories on your phone.
What they share is a reader who is also a participant. You don’t just follow the character; you decide what they do.
How did interactive fiction start? #
Colossal Cave Adventure (1975 to 1977) #
Around 1975, Will Crowther wrote Adventure in Fortran on a PDP-10 mainframe, drawing on his experience exploring real caves. He said he wanted players to have the illusion that they’d typed in English commands and the game did what they said. In 1977 Don Woods found the game and expanded it considerably, to about 140 map locations, and that version spread from computer to computer across universities.
Zork and Infocom (1977 to 1980s) #
In June 1977, four people at MIT (Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, Tim Anderson and Dave Lebling) started writing Zork. It was finished in early 1979, and several of the group went on to found Infocom later that year. Zork became the first text adventure to see widespread commercial release, and Infocom spent much of the 1980s as the leading name in the genre.
When did Choose Your Own Adventure books appear? #
The print side of the story started in 1976, when Edward Packard’s Sugarcane Island was published by Vermont Crossroads Press. Bantam Books launched the Choose Your Own Adventure series in 1979, starting with Packard’s The Cave of Time. Written in the second person, with choices that sent you to different pages, the series ran through 1998 with 184 titles and sold more than 250 million copies.
The original run ended as computer games took its readers. A new company, Chooseco, relaunched the series in 2003, and in August 2025 it began reissuing Packard’s titles. We cover where to find adult versions of the format in choose your own adventure books for adults.
What happened to text adventures? #
Graphics happened. Activision bought Infocom in 1986, after the failure of Infocom’s business software, and the company stopped producing text adventures a few years later. Commercial interactive fiction mostly disappeared by the early 1990s.
It didn’t die. In 1993 Graham Nelson released Inform, a programming language that compiled games to the same format Infocom had used, and a hobbyist community kept writing new text adventures for decades.
How did Japan’s visual novels fit in? #
Japan developed its own branch at the same time. The Portopia Serial Murder Case (1983) was an early milestone, and Chunsoft’s OtogirisÅ (1992) set the look of the visual novel: story text laid over a full-screen image. In 1994 Koei released Angelique, generally considered the first otome game, a romance game aimed at women. Our comparison of visual novels and chat stories covers how that format differs from message-based fiction.
Where did Twine come from? #
Chris Klimas released Twine in 2009 as a free, open-source tool for making interactive fiction that runs as a web page. It shows a story as a map of connected passages and needs no programming knowledge, which opened interactive fiction to writers who had never coded. Twine games such as Depression Quest (2013) reached wide audiences, and writer Charlie Brooker used Twine while developing the interactive film Black Mirror: Bandersnatch.
How did interactive fiction move to phones? #
Phones gave the form its biggest audience yet:
- 2014: Inkle releases 80 Days, a branching retelling of Jules Verne with about 750,000 words.
- 2015: Hooked launches chat stories told as text messages, and Lifeline has players texting a stranded astronaut in real time.
- 2016: Pixelberry releases Choices: Stories You Play, and Cheritz releases Mystic Messenger, an otome game played through a simulated messenger.
- 2017: Bury Me, My Love tells a Syrian migrant’s story entirely in texts.
- 2023: Ken and Roberta Williams, co-founders of Sierra On-Line, release a 3D remake of Colossal Cave Adventure through Cygnus Entertainment.
Today’s chat-story apps continue that line. Secret Fantasy, for example, tells interactive romances as message threads with short second-person narration between them, and your replies change who trusts you and how each story ends. It’s the same basic idea as Colossal Cave, with the typed command swapped for a chosen text message.
Interactive fiction timeline #
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| c. 1975 | Will Crowther writes Adventure |
| 1976 | Edward Packard’s Sugarcane Island is published |
| 1977 | Don Woods expands Adventure; work on Zork begins at MIT |
| 1979 | Infocom is founded; Bantam launches Choose Your Own Adventure |
| 1983 | The Portopia Serial Murder Case |
| 1986 | Activision buys Infocom |
| 1993 | Graham Nelson releases Inform |
| 1994 | Angelique, the first otome game |
| 2003 | Chooseco relaunches Choose Your Own Adventure |
| 2009 | Chris Klimas releases Twine |
| 2014 | Inkle’s 80 Days |
| 2015 | Hooked and Lifeline bring stories to text messages |
| 2016 | Choices: Stories You Play and Mystic Messenger |
| 2023 | 3D remake of Colossal Cave Adventure |
Frequently asked questions #
What was the first interactive fiction game? #
Colossal Cave Adventure, written by Will Crowther around 1975 and expanded by Don Woods in 1977, is generally considered the first. It inspired Zork and the whole text adventure genre.
Is interactive fiction a game or a book? #
Both, depending on the work. Text adventures and chat-story apps are software; Choose Your Own Adventure books are print. What they share is that the reader’s choices change the story. Many use second-person narration for the same reason, which we explain in why interactive stories are written in second person.
Are Choose Your Own Adventure books still published? #
Yes. Chooseco has published the series since 2003 and began reissuing Edward Packard’s titles in August 2025.
What tools do people use to write interactive fiction today? #
Twine is the most popular free tool for choice-based stories that run in a browser. Inform is used for parser-based text adventures. Ren’Py, which is free and open source, is widely used to make visual novels.