[Graham24]

"Zork I is a 1980 interactive fiction game"

Surely, these were called Adventure Games at the time. I never recall them being called that.

[icebraining]

The box art calls it Interactive Fiction: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/ac/Zork_I_box_ar...

EDIT: Some more info on the origins; apparently it was first used by an early creator of such games (Robert Lafore), and then picked up by Infocom: https://www.filfre.net/2011/09/robert-lafores-interactive-fi...

[ghaff]

Note that those boxes are not the original boxes. I’d have to research to figure out timelines but basically Infocom games came out in all sorts of shapes and sizes of which Starcross may have been the most elaborate. But at some point they standardized on the standard box form factor because of the demands of retailers.

I remember them as being called text adventures but as your link says they officially shifted to IF at some point.

[reshie]

that would be the right term.

you can see the evolution in cga vga games like quest for glory 1 or kings guest 1 or even space quest 1 you still had the console style input but was replaced with the menu bars that most remember from adventure games.

[gmueckl]

Even games like Maniac Mansion or Monkey Island where the ability to input text commands was gone retained a pseudo-commandline above the lower part of the screen with the verbs and inventory.

[icedchai]

When I played these in the 80's, we just called them "text adventures." The box did say Interactive Fiction... Nobody called them that.