The Hitch Hikers Guide to the galaxy was my favorite text adventure..

I DL'ed that one from Pablo's link but can't open it because I'm missing a shwm.dll file or something.

..."You're in a large cave. You can go N, E, W, or S".

Then you pressed the 'N' (north) key and you'd get something like

"You're in a small cave. You can go E or S"....

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Was that the one that started with a house and a stream, and you follow the stream to a grating, and you go down through the hole and somewhere there's a vase and a soft cushion, and you have to put the cushion down first so you don't break the vase, an then the damned troll starts throwing knives at you and....

Misspent youth

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That sounds like it was from 'The Pilgrim's Tale'(?) which I think was re-named from 'The Adventure Game' which was also re-named 'The Big Cave Adventure Game' or something.

You can DL that game from the link that Pablo gave.

My location descriptions came from the earliest games; Velnor's Lair, Planet Adventure, etc. Just one-liner descriptions that gave you the atmosphere of the Antartic 'cos there wasn't a background screen other than white.

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The one I was thinking of was called '"Colossal Cave" - I forgot its name until I did some Googling - and I found a web site where you can download a DOS version. It's bloomin' great! (And it wasn't a troll that pops out and throws a knife at you, it's a dwarf).

Get it from here: http://ravib.com/adv/index.htm