Dude, Where's My Text Parser?

An underground community of games may require typing, but I'm wondering, where did the text parser go?

Adventure games do still exist, you collect items which usually appear in an inventory at the bottom of the screen (known affectionately as hammer space) and you click them onto other items to solve puzzles.

But it wasn't always so simple. A time existed when you had to type every command in.

Take wallet

Open wallet

Take money from wallet

...You get the idea. In those days, Sierra led the way with series like Space Quest and King's Quest.

But somewhere along the way, something changed. The mouse became a more prominent feature in these games and the need to type commands just vanished.

It's sad to an extend. I learned to read at an adult level when I was five-years-old out of my determination to play this Space Quest game that had captivated my household.

Besides the education quality the text parser added, it also allowed programmers to put in witty replies to stupid commands: "Lets not and say we did," etc.

Though, my biggest issue is that with a limited number of commands given in these point-and-click games, puzzles with simple solutions are sometimes not so simple.

There was one game where the solution to a puzzle was to switch the mattresses from two beds. It took my about an hour to figure out that I had to click the USE command, click on one mattress and then click on the other. Just typing in "switch mattresses" would've made the solution easier and I wouldn't have felt so dirty looking at a walkthrough.

I guess there's always the Interactive Fiction community, along with Homestarrunner (who seem to understand what made old games great, even if all theirs are parodies.)