Text adventures were of their time. I spent many a night playing Infocom games...well I say playing, it was more like masochistic brain acrobatics.Remember the Babel fish puzzle from the Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy, need I say more? Yeah they and the later point click games were fun, but they've now become a niche pursuit as the general games playing market has moved on. Yes they were a lot of fun , but I don't wanna spend a couple of hours stuck on a puzzle looking at a blinking cursor again. I'd bet most people today probably wouldn't want to either . Also back in the day there was no instant access to the solution repository we call the internet . Would people today have the discipline to not look up anwsers? I 'm not sure I would ...That said, solving a puzzle in these games really made me feel like I'd achieved something and I rarely get that same sense from games today but as the saying goes The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
Fyi there's a really great Documentary on the subject called Get Lamp, totally worth a watch: