Tribute to Text-Mode Games was created by J. Michael Ambrosio, and has been in continuous operation since October 1999. I believe my site was the first to recognize text-mode games as a separate sub-genre within the general category of DOS games. Coming from a programming background, and having written a text-mode game myself, I was quite familiar with the peculiarities of text-mode, and the challenges it presented to game designers. When I started work on the site back in 1999, I did an extensive search for text-mode games, and although I found a handful scattered about in DOS game archives, they were never highlighted as being anything different or special. In some cases, they were mistakenly labeled as CGA games, a reference to the fact that they supported color (as opposed to monochrome) monitors. There was so much confusion about what a text-mode game was that when I launched my site I wrote a cover article, Why Text-Mode Games are Cool, to explain what was different about these games, and why I thought them worthy of showcasing.

Since Tribute to Text-Mode Games was first launched, interest in these games has grown to the point where the site now draws over five thousand page views per week, and a number of other sites (Underdogs - ASCII Classics and Text-Mode.com) have opened with the same theme, so I guess I must have been on to something. :) I am proud to have played a role in filling this little niche on the Internet, and since text-mode shows no signs of going away (it is still possible to open a DOS-style text box in Windows XP), I see no reason why these games cannot continue to provide amusement and nostalgia for many years to come.
 

 
 

To contact the webmaster, send e-mail to games@jma2001.com

Copyright 2002, 1999 J. Michael Ambrosio
All Rights Reserved