Predictably from my username I love text adventures, and looking back they were a big influence on me gaining skills in programming and such. I think it may have been just learning the paradigm of working with a console more than anything else.
There's still a lot of interactive fiction being made today, and you can find a lot of old and new games on the IF Archive[0]and IFDB [1]. New tools like Twine[2] are also allowing new forms of interactive fiction - "The Uncle Who Works For Nintendo"[3] recently showed up on the HN frontpage and was built in Twine.
Finally, I'll point out Inform 7[4] - a language designed for creating text adventures. It's all natural English grammar, and is really interesting in terms of design and parsing. I would highly suggest learning a bit of Inform and writing a small game in it, it's a very weird process. Also it will help you understand some of the jokes in _why's printer spools.
There's still a lot of interactive fiction being made today, and you can find a lot of old and new games on the IF Archive[0]and IFDB [1]. New tools like Twine[2] are also allowing new forms of interactive fiction - "The Uncle Who Works For Nintendo"[3] recently showed up on the HN frontpage and was built in Twine.
Finally, I'll point out Inform 7[4] - a language designed for creating text adventures. It's all natural English grammar, and is really interesting in terms of design and parsing. I would highly suggest learning a bit of Inform and writing a small game in it, it's a very weird process. Also it will help you understand some of the jokes in _why's printer spools.
[0] http://www.ifarchive.org/
[1] http://ifdb.tads.org/
[2] http://twinery.org/
[3] http://correlatedcontents.com/misc/UWWFN/UWWFN.html
[4] http://inform7.com/