50 Years of Text Games

What’s the first text game with a “transcript” (back-and-forth natural language interaction between a human and computer)? The answer may surprise you, because back-and-forth interactions were not how early computers were designed to work.

Many game history texts mention an unspecified number of 1950s “business management games,” often cited as some of the earliest text games. Period sources do discuss dozens of these games, but it seems there were really only two that were prime influences.

The first was designed by the American Management Association, and originally debuted at an exclusive (and probably expensive) retreat for business executives in July 1957. It was called “Top Management Decision Simulation” (sometimes “AMA’s Top…”), credited to Franc M. Ricciardi, Clifford J. Craft, and a half-dozen others, and was a relatively simple demonstration for its niche audience. The executives were split into teams, each controlling a virtual firm manufacturing a single product. They could set a retail price and divide expenditures between five possible categories, including rate of production and a marketing budget.

An IBM 650 mainframe would run each team's decisions against a simple economic model and churn out quarterly reports. In trying to track down what the actual input/output for this game looked like, though, I discovered something interesting.

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