Text adventure

From IFWiki

An older and now less common term for interactive fiction, drawing upon the title of "Colossal Cave Adventure" (Crowther and Woods, 1976) and reflected in the names of Scott Adams's "Adventureland" (1978) and his company, Adventure International.

As the medium evolved beyond the early treasure hunts and dungeon-crawls, "text adventure" began to seem too narrow in meaning, and Infocom eventually settled on "interactive fiction" instead. "Text adventure" now now either invokes nostalgia for those early plotless, two-word parser puzzle-hunts, or specifies a particular type of text game in the adventure genre (as opposed to, for example, mystery or deep simulation).

See also parser-based interactive fiction.