This is a great article -- but (some) commenters are missing that "type-in text games" means two different things in context: text games are games whose interface is primarily text-based, but type-in games here means "games distributed as source code printed in magazines or books". This is something that basically disappeared from computing history by the mid-1980s, as it stopped being even remotely practical as a distribution method.
This article, by the way, is sort of bonus material from Aaron Reed's 50 Years of Text Games, which is phenomenally interesting if you're the sort interested in that corner of computing history. While many "text games" are parser-based like Infocom's text adventures, Reed also gets into Twine games, Fallen London, Dwarf Fortress, King of Dragon Pass, ARGs and more.
I have collection of old magazines and just looking at pages of possibly even compressed code makes me somewhat miffed... They even added check sums on rows later to make it simpler process.
Whole thing was going to die with home computers, programs just grew too much for it to actually work.
I remember once in the early 80s typing in a very lengthy program listing from Byte or Nybble magazines on an Apple ][e.
It wasn't BASIC or even Assembler, but machine code!
It didn't run at first so I printed it all out (on 15" wide green bar paper) and on several bus rides to and from school would compare the magazine code to my own print-out until I found the few bytes I had mistyped. Checksums would have been nice!
IIRC it was some kind of music program that let you type in melodies and play them back on the PC speaker. I took a melody line and a bass line from a song I was writing at the time and typed them in on two neighboring PCs in the university lab. When all was ready, I pressed the two Enter keys at the same time, and after weeks of work had several seconds of glorious full-volume square-wave harmony! Formative moments!
> This is something that basically disappeared from computing history by the mid-1980s, as it stopped being even remotely practical as a distribution method.
It was very much alive as the distribution method for getting TI-BASIC games onto calculators in the mid-to-late 90s.
If you didn't know anyone with access to the parallel-port graphlink cable, your only option was transcribing it manually. One someone transcribed a copy, distribution with the included male-male cable was possible.
I had the book "Cosmic Games for the Vic 20". I tried to type in some games, but wasn't all that impressed. I think it was "Treasure Hunt" and the bird broke the newline, leaving the screen looking off.
This article, by the way, is sort of bonus material from Aaron Reed's 50 Years of Text Games, which is phenomenally interesting if you're the sort interested in that corner of computing history. While many "text games" are parser-based like Infocom's text adventures, Reed also gets into Twine games, Fallen London, Dwarf Fortress, King of Dragon Pass, ARGs and more.